Sugar Rush
by Fuzzy Necromancer
Summary: Weird Wally turns Jump City into a candy dystopia. Terra, Raven, and Starfire must overthrow him and rescue the others from his clutches. Contains weight gain, bloodshed, fat, humorously inventive torture, overeating and obscure pop culture references.
1. Chapter 1

**I**

Dinner at the Titan Tower was finished. Terra and Cyborg were licking their plates to obtain the last 6 food molecules that had escaped their maws; Robin was fastidiously wiping away with a napkin; Starfire was finishing off the cardboard pizza box; and Beast Boy stuck two chopsticks in his nose and sang "I Am the Walrus". Raven frowned inexpressively.

A strong sense of anticipation was in the air. After they were all finished with their respective tasks (except Raven, she was never finished frowning inexpressively) Robin put down his napkin. "Okay, time for dessert."

The table glittered with expressions of childlike delight. Starfire set before her a large apple pie with chocolate whipped cream, mustard, and crumbled hamburger that was just a few days past its expiration date. Cyborg dug into a small chocolate bunt cake (he had sworn off pies ever since the Mother Mae-Eye incident), Robin munched a Hershey bar, Beast Boy dug into a Sunday, and Terra consumed an entire bag of mini candy bars without removing the wrapping. Raven just shook her head.

"Hon't hoo rant hum-hing?" Beast Boy asked. He meant to say "Don't you want something," but his mouth was working around a particularly large piece of ice cream and a cherry.

"No thanks. I've lost my appetite," Raven said, filling each word with a heavy scoop of detached disdain. She rolled her eyes slightly, made the slightest of nauseated expressions, and then floated away to her room.

Once there, Raven closed the door. She activated the lock, double-lock, manual lock, and cast Arcane Lock on the entry point. She then cast a false scrying spell on the room so that anybody watching by magical means would see an illusion of her meditating. She threw covers over her mirror, her crystal ball, and a few other objects in her room that could sometimes act as two-way portals. She closed her eyes and swept the entire room for living presences, checking to make sure each insect was neither supernaturally linked to another entity nor green colored. She closed her windows and activated a black tint and drew the curtains. Thusly content, she let out a long, deep, sigh.

Raven got out her skull-shaped multi-purpose audio player, a specialty music-instrument that played records, audiotapes, and CDs, and received radio in FM, AM, and HAM, and she put on some slow music. . She reached into the pocket dimension she kept in a chest in her closet, and took out her dirty little secret.

Slowly, tenderly, she stripped off the brown paper. She breathed deeply through her nose, taking in the smell. She gently rubbed against it, licking the big, long, hard, chocolate bar.

Soon she was lying on the bed, belt off, leotard replaced with a loose pair of pajamas pushed back by her bulging belly. She radiated a visible afterglow of delight, rubbing her stomach, and let loose a long happy belch. With a soft, self-amused irony in her voice, she whispered flatly:

"Was it good for you?"

The titan tower alarm sounded, and Raven was stirred from her euphoria. She cursed quietly and discharged black sparks, then went to quickly get dressed.

**II**

The titans arrived on the crime scene at Low-Security E-Z-Rob Banks, (a division of GeneriCo). A group of citizens from varying demographics were huddled in a small crowd at one end of the wall, with an elderly unarmed security guard pinned against the wall by a massive gob of cookie dough. The sinister figure had an emotionless face and a mottled brown costume, adorned with a cookie on the front and the back with four embossed letter C's. The titans burst in apparently catching the villain at the tail-end of a monologue. "-to ME, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Caper!"

Raven took a brief moment to speculate the decrease of dignity in the super-villain profession. Robin extended his combat pole. "Time for your cookies to crumble. Titans, Go!"

Beast Boy transformed into a Rhinocerous and charged at the offender, horn lowered, nostrils flaring. The cookie on the CCCC's chest-plate opened up and ejected four rapid blasts of thick cookie dough. Beast Boy gave a startled bellow as he stretched a few feet forward, then was violently yanked back by the elastic and adhesive powers of the substance, pinned to the ground. Cyborg stepped forward and extended his arm, transforming it into a sonic cannon. Before he could begin charging, the other man flicked his wrist and struck his face with two cookies. One shattered his glass eye, the other cut right into his organic one. He grabbed his face, his eyelid blinking over a chocolate chip cookie instead of his normal retinal material. He staggered out of the building screaming "I'M BLIND!".

Robin leapt at the Cookie Caper, but was knocked out through the window by a stream of baked goods projectiles. Starfire flew at the four-C villain, but he landed a swift blow against her lower back and she gave a funny jerking movement and went limp. The figure grabbed her, dragging her out. Starfire came to quickly, but before she could regain her strength, the Chocolate Chip Cookie Caper opened up some tube-like apparatus on his arm-piece, put her in a headlock, and shoved it into her mouth, dragging her out as it whirred. She struggled to keep from choking as a steady flow of thick gooey cookie dough and warm cookie chunks pumped down her throat. This enemy seemed to be trying to bloat her to incapacitation, an effort which would prove vain. While he seemed to know the right place to stun a Tamaranian with one hit, the knowledge of her nine stomachs must be beyond him. Raven rose up, prepared to rend him apart with a wave of thaumaturgical force. "Azerath MetroMMPH!" she said, half-choking on the cookie that was forced into her mouth at high velocity. The moment she barely swallowed it down, her mouth was too dry and her throat irritated, and two more were jammed in to replace the cookie. She gave a muffled moan of frustration.

Meanwhile, Beast Boy struggled against his doughy bonds, taking a number of forms but to no avail.

"A little help here?"

**III**

Outside Robin sprung to his feet at the CCCC's approach, shaking off sharks of glass and flecks of blood as he rose. Banishing the stabs of pain from his mind, he brought up his fighting stick and grabbed a birdarang in one fluid motion. The confectionary-themed nemesis swung around and held the struggling Starfire directly in the line of fire. As he continued pumping a steady stream of cookie dough into her, he poked her globular gut, looked at Robin threateningly and snapped his fingers. The nonverbal message was clear: one wrong move and she bursts. Cyborg was still stumbling around, the cookie lodged in his eye socket blinking stupidly, while having a desperate conversation with a street lamp. Raven burst out from the shadows but was struck a twin cookie-shot in the mouth and in her nose. Spitting half-chewed cookie and blood streaming from her nose, she shouted in a commanding but distorted voice "Aderab medion gynhoze!"

It was at this crucial point that Terra joined the fray. She sprung from a nearby rooftop, having been helplessly deposited there earlier by a strong breeze, riding a slab of asphalt-coated topsoil. Letting loose a whoop of exhilaration, she flared with yellow light and clenched her fists. For a moment nothing happened. Then the Chocolate Chip Cookie Caper was pulverized into the ground at high speed with 150 pounds of mixed loam, 20 pounds of floor paneling, 15 pounds of cookie dough, and a very surprised green rhinocer

**IV**

By this time the dough had dried out, and with that final jarring Beast Boy managed to shake himself free of bonds, rise up, and resume human form. Starfire, Robin, Terra, Cyborg, and Raven stared openly. "Yeah, pretty impress-"

"LOOK!" Terra shouted stupidly.

Beast Boy turned around and fainted.

The CCCC's face was scattered on the surrounding area. Closer inspection would show it to be flecks of frosting, colored and textured to perfectly resemble a human face. Instead of a face, he had a churning mass of cookie dough. He rose up, staggering but otherwise visibly unfettered by the experience.

The figure pulled out a bag of pop rocks and tore it open, pouring its contents onto the ground. Instead of the usual tiny candies, a series of bright flashes came forth, like a rainbow of signal flares. The ground began to rumble. Robin's mouth moved subconsciously, wordlessly, recognizing the conclusion he had come to. "It's a trap."

As Robin turned in the direction from which the rumbling had come, a strange sight met his eyes. Something like a flattish, translucent brown sagging tidal wave was rolling over the streets. He wasn't sure what it was, but he knew the command to give.

"Titans, FLEE!"

Beast Boy transformed into a cheetah and set off, bounding across the urban jungle. Robin bounded off in an undignified leap-skip hybrid movement, caring more about his survival than his public image. Terra rose into the air and surfed along on a chunk of concrete. Raven vanished into the shadows. Starfire soared up just above the wave. Cyborg had barely turned around when the mass struck him. It was strange, like a man drowning in slow-motion. He pulled and struggled, but with all his efforts he was engulfed by the thick sticky undertow. Robin was the next to go, caught when he made a fatal stumble and was ensnared like a mosquito in tree sap. Beast Boy recalled too late that, while a cheetah had speed, it lacked endurance. He paused when he got a taste of the sticky goop that had contained him in its smothering embrace. He let out a fading scream of warning, three stretched syllables. Within minutes the golden-brown tide receded, bringing the three titans with it. Raven, Terra, and Starfire flew alone.

They searched for hours before finding a height untouched by the golden-molasses mass. It was titan tower. The trunk of the massive "T" was completely engulfed, and the sticky stuff lapped at the lower sides. Terra slid clumsily onto the wall, collapsed onto all fours, and tried to keep from heaving in the exhaustion, granting her strong resemblance to a dying stick insect. Raven gracefully alighted and eased down the nearly unconscious Starfire with a cushion of telekinetic energy. Raven stared out grimly from the edge of Titan tower, a solitary island in a sea of caramel.


	2. Chapter 2

**I**

Robin awoke with a jolt. His head throbbed and he couldn't move anything below his neck. It was as if he was encased in crystallized candy and somebody had decided to rouse him by shattering the layer on his head with a blunt instrument. He saw nothing but darkness. "\Why is it so dark? Why can't I move?"  
"You are here," an unfamiliar voice said, "and the reason why it's dark is because your eyes are shut. If you change that m'boy, I'm sure you'll find the answer to your second question."  
Robin opened his eyes. As he adjusted to the light, he noticed that he was encased in what appeared to be hardened caramel several inches thick. He tried to take stock of his surroundings, but everything beyond a few feet was a blur.  
"Why can't I see right?" he demanded of the voice.  
"You have hibernation sickness. Your eyes will adjust soon."  
A loud yawn made him turn to the left. "Did somebody make a Star Wars reference?" Beast Boy groggily inquired. He appeared to be in a similar predicament. To the right of Robin, Cyborg was completely covered in caramel. A tall figure came into focus, and whammed Cyborg on the head with a massive bar of chocolate. There was a clattering and a metal ringing sound, and Cyborg awoke with a groan. He blinked, still blinded by the cookie. The prosthetic adolescent then opened his eye wide, closed his mouth, and with a supreme effort bulged his eyeball to send the cookie flying.

The tall figure came into clearer definition as he approached the Boy Wonder. He was tall and lanky, more than six feet and not an ounce over 120. He moved with a light-hearted grace, feigning a stumble or skipping on every third step with a gait that was at once casual and melodramatic. The elaborate purple suit he wore appeared to be the best 19th-century outfit money could by. His top-hat was supported by a golden-brown slightly curly hair. Beneath the hair was a narrow face with twinkling eyes and a roguish smile. The man wielded a 4ft long candy cane that served its non-candy function, and was marked with some odd frosting dots and gum-drops.

"Ladies, gentlemen, and adolescent superheroes of all ages, welcome to Weird Wally's Candy-Shop of Mystical Wonders! Here are confections to make your mouth water, creations to make your eyes spark, joys to make your heart sing, and, like a similar establishment by a Merlin fellow, all the torments of hell!" He said the whole thing with an enticing flare that would put a circus ringmaster to shame. His eyes twinkled meaningfully without conveying any real message and he ended the speech with mischievous wink and a tip of his top-hat.

With a twirl of his cane, the whole area lit up. Flashing signs and colorful displays bombarded their optic nerves. Long assembly lines produced human-sized gingerbread men. Vast vats bubbled with enough chocolate, caramel, and other sugary elements to drown a yak. Lollipops the size of mature maple trees towered over them. Life-sized gingerbread condominiums revealed 6ft-tall ornately carved chocolates. This was a place that would cause Dr. Atkins to run away screaming and burst into flames. This was indeed a candy paradise.

**II**

"Is it safe?" Starfire asked. Raven opened the door by way of answer. They were met with a glowing amber-colored wall. Terra stumbled back and stifled a shriek, for the first moment thinking that the wave of caramel had followed them. Just as quickly it died in her throat: the barrier facing them was solid and dry. Starfire curiously tapped against it, and was met with a hollow sound. She pressed harder, and the obstruction shattered. Overbalanced by her push, she stumbled out into the light. The surface she penetrated was nothing other than a sheet of hardened caramel. Raven and Terra followed her out, blinking in the sun.

The city before them was different. The familiar grey and blue color scheme of jump city was replaced with a variety of vibrant, eye-juicing neon hues. Obscured by the distance and the light mist rising of the water, they couldn't make out finer details, but something about the place seemed very…wrong.

Uncharacteristically silent and stoic, Starfire floated out across the water. Terra and Raven, each meeting the other with a curious blend of hateful glare and helpless shrug, followed.

As they alighted upon the shore the three titans took in their surroundings with intensified curiosity and unease. The harbor was abandoned, with an uncomfortable recently-evacuated look. The lone ferry-boat docked there bore the dayglo bright yellow legend "The Good Ship Lollipop". A nearby bar/tavern usually frequented by the boatmen was newly done with shining paint that managed to look bright and fresh yet neglected at the same time. The building's name, "Frankenfish's Lab"(1) was replaced with a flamboyantly scripted sign declaring it the "Saltwater Taffy". The same strange alteration extended as far as the eye could see. It looked as if some fanatical children's television set designer, accompanied by a small army of remodeling professionals, had swept through under the influence of bad acid.

Everything was still and quiet. A slow, vaguely carnival-like music strain drifted through the streets, distant enough to be indistinct but close enough to be annoying. This pseudo-cheerful music only served to further emphasize the silence by contrast. Here and there a patch of congealed caramel shone in the sun.

"What has occurred here?" Starfire wondered aloud. It was only a whisper, but Raven and Terra winced at the sound and made hushing motions at her. Something about the atmosphere heavily discouraged any noise.

The trio slowly drifted through the streets, each city block as tackily transmuted and eerily empty of life as the last. So still were the surroundings that several minutes passed before Terra was convinced the rhythmic sound she heard was not her imagination.

It was a low, regular sound, like the beating of a drum or the trot of a horse. It sounded in fact very much like the march of feet, but there was something oddly flat and narrow about the noise, as if the weight of a man was being distributed jerkily over a very small space. Once she began to really _listen_ instead of just hearing, Terra noticed another thing about the sound. It was getting closer.

**III**

Starfire didn't hear the sound because she was too busy trying to identify an odd smell. It wasn't like the exhaust, fried food, and urine aromas that usually mingled in the jump city air. It was a sharp, cutting aroma, something that was at once pleasant and the slightest bit painful. It faintly reminded her of certain earth plants and those powdered substances that Beast Boy would shake on foods to give it "an extra kick". It also vaguely connected with the special reagents and herbs used by the cultists of Nra'al to preserve the bodies of their dead. With this strong, almost spicy smell, there was a sugary overtone, and something crisp and cold-smelling. The overall aroma seemed to add up to something very specific, something she had encountered once or twice before on this planet, lingering in her third consciousness level, irritatingly out of reach.

**IV**

Raven neither heard nor smelt, because she was shutting out the physical world, trying to zoom in on what it was she was _sensing_. There was something about this place, an aura of magic. While she could tell that some powerful sort of magic had done an exterior redecoration on Jump City, no doubt the same invocation that had brought forth a tidal wave of caramel, there was some other lingering power in the area, and it was moving.(2) It was a fading aura of power, probably the kind of magic left-over from the spell that called or created these mobile entities, whatever they were, but the background aura was so strong and these auras so similar that she had to almost entirely cut herself off from her surroundings just to focus on it.

In this way the three heroines continued. Each Titan was absorbed in her own subtle form of warning and too unsure to tell the others about it lest they make them nervous or feel silly. It is therefore entirely understandable that they only really figured out what they had come up against when Starfire turned the corner and let out a sudden screech of alarm.

(1)This particular title had been a pathetic attempt to cash in on an infestation of snakehead fish (also referred to as "frankenfish" by the news media) that found their way into the jump city harbor. The attempt failed during the event, but for some inexplicable reason the name stuck.  
(2)An odd thing about magical auras is that they are harder to see when they are moving than they are when still. It is for this reason that even a thaumaturgically impaired individual can often "feel" that a place has an aura of power about it, and likewise why mystical concealment methods such as invisibility and silence spells do not negate their purpose when attempting to evade an arcane caster.

**V**

Starfire backed up slowly as Raven and Terra rushed around to see what had frightened her. Raven did not betray a hint of emotion on her face, but her hands clamped into fists and the sidewalk beneath her cracked with a black flicker. Terra simply went limp, staring and gaping in dumbfounded disbelief.

The 6ft tall gingerbread cookies marching towards them were instantly recognizable, as plain and out of place as a rabid Bengal tiger in a French café. The air shimmered about them, and the ground beneath them shimmered with reflection like a desert mirage. The arms that should have lacked any flexibility whatsoever where curled around massive 5ft candy canes, holding them like bayonets. There was something distinctly unreal and wrong about there movement, a fluid irregularity, like bad stop-motion animation in a sixties monster film. With the unearthly locomotion of those baked impossibilities, the frosting smile on their heads might as well have been a human skull.

They did not slow as they approached the titans, nor did they give any sign of recognition whatsoever. Without missing a beat they passed them by, pulling out their candy canes, and knocked them down with a yanking sweep.

Starfire was the first to recover. While she was still trying to make sense of the situation, another part of her mind snapped eagerly into battle mode, calling forth combat reflexes and righteous fury. She snarled, eyes glowing, rose into the air, and unleashed a maelstrom of green energy blasts, clearing a 15ft radius in the oncoming opposition. Raven spoke her words of power, and with a swirl of darkness she rose into the air. A black flash swept outward from her and the nearest gingerbread warriors were crushed into crumbs.

As soon as the two she-warriors had dispensed of the enemy ranks, a new wave trudged in to replace them. There where strong ones with red candy canes and red frosting, and faster ones with green-striped candy canes and green frosting. They were streaming in, yet the two heroines never wavered in their destructive volley of light and dark. It only stopped when Raven's concentration was shattered and Starfire gave a surprised yelp as they both felt a strong tug on their legs. They had forgotten that they were fighting in an intersection, and while Starfire blasted away the crimson peppermint wielding warriors to the north of them and Raven eliminated the spearmint-swinging dexterous combatants to the south, they were caught by surprise and yanked with a jump and a swing of the candy cane by a small clutch of enemies approaching from the side. Raven's concentration was shattered, and between the confusion, curiosity as to what had happened, morbid foreboding, repressed concerns about Robin and the others, and the fright of her current situation, there was simply no room in Starfire's root-like nervous system for righteous anger or boundless confidence needed to access her alien powers.

Terra felt slow and stupid, her brain reeling from the blow. The brown blurs stamping around her had stopped being pushed back by the green blur and the black blur. She closed her eyes to block out all these blurs and try to stop the world from violently spinning around her, and took deep, calming breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. She smelled something. It was gingerbread, spicy and sugary. Over the din she heard her stomach rumble and thought how it had been hours since she last ate, and she felt drool trickling down her cheek in a way that tickled annoyingly. She wiped it off her mouth with a hand, rubbed that off on her jeans, and resolved in her mildly concussed state to get up, find where the cookies where, and see if she could have any.

The first thing Terra saw when she opened her eyes was, of course, a 6ft tall gingerbread man. She instantly grabbed the animated cookie and scarfed it. With a few gulps the partially-chewed mass went down her throat and appeared as a large teardrop-shaped bulge in her stomach. She panted a little to cool of her tongue, (for some reason the gingerbread was still hot as the oven that baked it), and then gave a satisfied burp. While she stood there, patting her bulging stomach and licking her fingers, a loud cry of "HELP!" brought her attention to the plight of Starfire and Raven.

**VI**

"Oh, right" Terra said sheepishly. She turned to aid them, but a row of candy-canes barred her way. Quickly she gave a strong ripple through the earth that knocked all the gingerbread men flat on their backs, crumbling a few and shattering a number of candy canes. She yanked as many candy as she could from their feeble and inexplicable grips, and set about devouring all but one.

"Hah! I guess you're all unarmed now! Beat THAT!" Terra shouted at the cookie constructs, inwardly thinking that her trash talk lines needed some work. The opposition did not respond, they simply moved forward slowly, and bludgeoned her with their broad flat hands. She stumbled back with a scream as she felt the searing pain of their slapping blows and their fresh-from-the-bakery heat. "Use your SUPER POWERS you chunkhead!" Raven shouted, forgetting to be sarcastic in her distress and desperation. Terra let loose another groundwave and knocked the cookie men down, pulled up a chunk of earth and terrakinetically(3) surfed over to yank the candy canes off Starfire. The blond battler stretched her mouth out to an improbable span and crammed the seven or eight 6inch diameter candy canes in, crunching off the tops and widening her stomach to a 9inch-radius semicircle.  
"You know," she said defensively as the gingerbread goons began to rise again, clutching her stomach, "you guys could help out too."

Raven was not in the mood to hear this. She felt the anger welling up in her. She made to block it and clear her mind, but then thought better. Instead of choking it off, she fed it, musing, gathering her silent grudges and frustrations. She thought of how much Beast Boy had annoyed her, how much she hated that blond boney bitch, how frustrated she was that she could never fully express herself; she thought all the bitter and angry thoughts that until now had stewed and nurtured in resentful silence. She let loose an octivated roar, four red eyes glaring, jagged teeth glinting, and with her many tendrils of darkness wrenched the candy cane from her assailants' grips. She demolished the nearest cluster with a faster-than-sight flurry of demon-bites, leaving in her wake a carpet of crumbs and occasional drops of steaming sulphurous spittle.

Starfire was no stranger to the concept of eating enemies in battle. It was a common practice in Tamaranian warfare to devour an opponent's still-warm heart to gain their strength and their rich protein, maybe with some steaming entrails as a dessert. She had personally fully consumed several wild Korglzaks, a pair of Drooglanian bounty hunters, and an overconfident mugger(4) who assaulted her in the back-alleys of Jump City. So it was that she invoked the ancient battle-hunger, letting loose a hypersonic roar of warning that shattered the air for miles around. Her eyes filled with green light, as if some crackling alien force of pure energy was struggling to escape from her skull. Her lips pulled back in a parody of a grin to bare her teeth and her serrated chitin ridge. Her two retractable mandibles slid out from flesh-pouches just above her jaw-line and clamped upon the nearest enemy she could see.

The results were instantaneous. Without conscious effort on her part, the warmth and flavor caused her mouth-parts to reflexively draw the hapless magical concoction into one of her nine growling stomachs. She almost fell dumb with the shock of it. Instead of the usual sour bone marrow and hot rush of gooey innards, the thing she had eaten was spiced, dry, and sweet. What strange manner of creature could the Earth yield that had no use for fluid in its entire body? This mystery drifted back and forth between her primary and tertiary consciousness as she resumed her feasting with doubled vigor.

_______________________________________  
(3)Not a weak pun, but rather a word using latin meaning's for terra's powers, "terra" meaning earth, ground, or soil, and "kinesis" meaning to move or movement  
(4)In a rare show of tact and perception of local taboo, she had neglected to mention this particular gastronomic excursion to the other titans upon their first meeting

**VII**

Between the three of them, it was a matter of minutes before the malevolent munchies had been completely ingested. Raven groaned. Her supernaturally enhanced state had subsided, and now she clutched the painfully distended gut that nearly exceeded the rest of her total body mass, stretching her spandex to transparency. She gave one of those juicy, half-belch half-spit up burps that always leaves a nasty taste in your mouth, then collapsed onto her back.  
Starfire was nearly three times as overfull as Raven. Her bulging belly could have easily fit in Cyborg and a few volley balls, but she managed to pick up her barely-concious friend and carry the awkward load into an abandoned department store, which she had internally chosen as their base camp for the night. Thanks to her vacuous tameranian digestive track, she was not yet suffering any discomfort of overeating and in fact would have eagerly gulped down two or three more gingerbread men if given the chance.

Food was not on her thoughts at the moment though. The battle was over, but there was little doubt that the war was. From all she had seen these entities lacked the initiative and the intelligence to effect a change as massive as this. Perhaps she would talk about it with Raven later.  
Starfire set her down on one of the display beds, with the loving care of a true friend, tucking the blankets over the gorged grey gut, watching it jiggle as Raven breathed. She gave a small, restrained smile meant for Raven alone, then went back outside to get Terra.

Somehow, Terra had managed to out-eat a nine-stomached alien and a raging half-demon. At this point she resembled nothing so much as a giant egg with human limbs attached to it. The nearly translucent mass of overstuffed flesh bulged out from her once-oversized now painfully-tight shirt in a highly improbable way, as if she had happened to be leaning back with her mouth open and somebody fired a gob of wet cement at her from a cannon.

"Hey StarfIOOOURP!" The blond bulge blushed slightly at this gaseous eruption, but picked up without faltering. "I was wondering, could you help me, er, get inside somewhere to rest? I'm a feeling a *burp* bit bloated." A large sweatdrop dangled from her brow and she gave Starfire a grin that could not have been more sheepish if her body was coated in wool and she was duct-taped to a piece of mutton.  
"Of course friend Terra," Starfire said, pleasantly skipping over the rude noise. She got behind her and pushed as best she could, stretching her arms to reach them around her own overstuffed gut, and slowly rolled Terra through the double doors of the building and into a king-sized display bed.

When Starfire lay down to rest herself, exhausted as she was, her mind was not yet prepared to sleep. A thousand questions raced through her mind, criss-crossing on the separate yet intertwined awareness levels that make up the inhuman Tamaranian psyche. Who was behind this? How had they caused this massive change, and that huge wave of caramel? Where was Robin? Was he alright? What about amusing Beast Boy and wise Cyborg? Who was responsible for this? What where they trying to achieve, and why?  
"If a ventricle on his epidermis is harmed, whoever or whatever you are, may Shub-Nigguroth's embrace revoke your wretched life before I have the chance to wrench it from you."


	3. Chapter 3

**I**

"AAAUUHHHOOOHH!"  
Robin cringed, shielding his ears as much as his binds would allow.  
"OOohhHOOH! NOOOOOO-HO! PLEEEAAASE AAAH AHH AAAAHHHHH!"  
He just couldn't block out Cyborg's screams of agony. The sound kept undulating past the normal octaves into a high-pitched thrum that you felt as a skin-crawling pain.  
"EEEYAAAEEEEEEGGGE!"  
_Who would have thought that a well-muscled, large masculine cyborg weighing over five hundred pounds had such shrill, high-pitched penetrating screams?_

"Talk, you pathetic canned meat. I want to know everything about your lady friends. What are their powers? What are their weaknesses? How can I trap them, beat them, or bend them to my will?" the capricious candyman expatiated.

"I'll say anything you want if you'll just let me have a bite of that snickers bar!" Cyborg moaned.

He opened his mouth, tongue stretching out in improbable contortions, struggling to reach the half-unwrapped candy bar that dangled tantalizingly just out of his reach. Just as he stretched his tongue a little further, the uncannily dexterous arm jerked it away from him.

"First the chit-chat, then the kit-kat," Weird Wally chided in a gentle but firm fatherly tone.

"But that's a snicker's-" Beast Boy said, and then his voice gave out leaving his mouth flapping a few seconds after it. Right where there had definitely been a Snickers bar in WW's hand there was now a picture-perfect king-sized kit-kat bar(5). Beast boy blinked.  
"How did you do that?"

The manic man turned to his captive and gave an innocent eyebrow-raise as if to say "How did I do what?" which snapped back into a roguish grin with a sparkling wink.

"Magic" he said, with a tone that could just as easily be mocking or serious. Just as Cyborg managed to stick his tongue onto the wrapper, the Candy Man flipped it carelessly away to the ground where the multifarious chocolate skidded a dozen feet. It came to a stop well out of the weeping Cyborg's grasp.

"Why do you want to know about the girls?" Robin asked with a harsh, accusing voice. You'd think that somebody wearing a mask concealing their eyeballs couldn't narrow their eyes and meet somebody's gaze with two shrunken pupils at the center of a bloodshot orb of rage, but the Boy Wonder managed it.

"Yeah," Cyborg said, picking up Robin's thread. "What sort of depravities do you have in mind for them, you uncomplimentary description sicko?!", he shouted.(6)

"My my, don't we have warped little imaginations," Weird Wally tsked. "I assure you that I have none of _those_ intentions, regardless of what penthouse horror stories your hormone-charged brains might concoct. Anyway, talk of perversion is rich coming from a grown man who _spends his time with bed-wetting chil-dren!_" The last few words were whistled out with a mocking melodic sing-song tone and rhythm.

"HEY! I'm only nineteen! It just happens that I exude a powerful air of wisdom and maturity."

"HEY! Who are you calling children?" Robin snapped, his usual reserve and trash-talk lost in the heat of outrage.

"Yeah, we're teenagers!" Beast Boy said indignantly. "I stopped wetting the bed _months_ ago!"

Weird Wally shook his head like a teacher whose favorite student has greatly disappointed him.

"While I do admire your spirit, won't you please shut up for a few seconds so that I can tell you lots of useful information that you can use against me after you escape?"

Three mouths clamped shut as one, and three heads nodded vigorously.

"Well that's too bad. I can't stand being interrupted, and I'm going to go and do something time-consuming and distracting and not pay attention to you for a while," he said with a pout, and stamped off with an over-exaggerated aura of wounded pride.

(5)try saying that three times fast.  
(6) He was still really bitter about the candy bar

**II**

Robin looked around, listened, and then let out a breath.  
"Okay Beast Boy, Cyborg, while he's gone look around for something to cut these ropes."

Beast Boy sniffed and screwed up his face.  
"Robin, these aren't ropes, their licorice."

Robin blinked at this unusual display of insight.  
"Oh. Well then, start eating."  
"But I _hate_ licorice! It tastes like tires and castor oil! It's got to be the worst candy ever invented!"  
"Don't you want to get out of here?" Cyborg asked.  
"But there's-"  
"EAT!", they both shouted, cutting of the protest of the youngest titan. With a mirror-cracking grimace of revulsion, he set to chewing.

**III**

Weird Wally strode purposefully down a narrow hallway of candy-cane arches. His footsteps clanged on the smooth floor, echoing deep and loud. They sounded altogether unlike the footsteps that should be made by a thin, tall, lanky man. Rather they created the impression of great size and distance, as if with every step he took a cyclopean colossus mimicked his motion on some higher plane.

His flowing movement drew attention to how utterly wrong he was. His swinging arms seemed to bend at different places, but when you looked straight at them the elbows where centered correctly. His legs lurched too far ahead of him, but remained connected normally to his body and barely raised. Every straight line in his body seemed to have points that could only occupy a curve; every limb jerked from one spot to another without wasting time in the intervening space; every spatial aspect of his form seemed to flow and twist mockingly when you weren't looking directly at it. Trying to stare at him for more than a few seconds would condemn the observer to watery eyes, nausea, and vertigo. You got the unshakeable impression that if he traced a circle in the ground it's pi would come out to four.

At last the curious candyman terminated his non-Euclidian amble at a pair of towering rock-candy doors. With a spin and a flourish he inserted his candy cane into the keyhole. The gargantuan gateway swung upon with the resentful groan of an enslaved giant, only to swing shut behind him with the speed of thought.

Darkness surrounded. Weird Wally tapped his staff, muttered something in Latin, and a small bar of white chocolate in his hand shone with the gleam of a searchlight. The phosphorescent fun-size floated gently upwards, until its ethereal luminescence reached the edges of the vaulted ceiling.  
Basketball champions could have played on a trampoline there. It was a room suitable for King Kong to do jumping jacks in. The white walls would dwarf most office buildings. Perspective reduced the ceiling to the size of a postage stamp. The tiled floor stretched far enough to show the curvature of the earth.  
The room was large.

The dominating feature was a 12ft-long scale candy wrapper nailed against the wall, hung above a boiling vat of molten chocolate. A series of 4ft stairs led to the elevated cauldron, but the unearthly Mr. Wally ascended them without bending a knee.

Weird Wally raised his candy cane to the wrapper, a motion charged with command and power. He struck a pose that looked like Moses parting the Red Sea, only more impressive.

The colossal candy-bar wrapper opened, revealing its shining foil interior. The reflection in it bent and distorted, until it resembled a crude and alien thing. The shining image had a broad body without distinct head or torso, wreathed in twelve twitching limbs that were neither arms nor legs. Three patches appeared on it equidistant from each other, but whether any of them where eyes, mouth, or orifice unknown was beyond guessing. Harsh reflective glares and wrinkles in the wrapper made it impossible to detect fine details, as did a certain reluctance of the mind to form a clear picture of anything so alien. The thing undulated experimentally, stretched and contracted its members, and then spoke.

Against all expectations, the voice that emerged was high, beautiful, and feminine, although somewhat garbled. It sounded like a heartsick teenage maiden on a phonograph played underwater.  
"Master of my essence, what is your desire?"

Weird Wally paused for a second, carefully choosing his wording.  
"I desire to see the girls Raven, Terra, and Starfire in their fights against my gingerbread minions."

"As you desire, so it shall be," the entity crooned. The ghastly reflection shimmered and was replaced with a montage of images: Terra being tripped with a candy cane, Raven crumbling a gingerbread man with telekinesis, Starfire buried under a heap of assailants. It then showed the tide of battle turn, Terra crunching up candy canes and their wielders, Raven engaging in a flurry of demon-bites, and Starfire in full tamaranian feeding frenzy.

He nodded thoughtfully, taking in the whirlwind of images without a blink, taking note of Terra's earth-powers, Starfire's energy blasts, and Raven's supernatural abilities.

He watched them dispose of his entire legion of cookie-combatants and end the battle with a few mouth-wipings, stomach-rubbings, and reverberating belches.

He smiled.

He tapped his wand twice, and the images vanished, replaced with the otherworldly thing.

"Is there anything else you desire?" it said, with the forced cheerfulness of a petulant brat apologizing to her brother in front of adults.

"I desire to open the portal no more or less than twelve feet above solid ground, at an area within three miles of the last location of Terra, Raven, and Starfire of the group calling themselves the Teen Titans, in a space not currently occupied by solid objects."

The shape churned, its dark spots shifting slightly, and two of its appendages touched.

"As you desire, it shall be."

The molten chocolate became smooth as polished glass, and its reflection shifted to display an abandoned gymnasium.

Weird Wally strode down the steps and reached three 12ft high crates a casual observer would swear had not been their before. In the blink of an eye he had them stacked on top of each other. He stalked back up the stairs, balancing the lot on his left hand while gesticulating with the candy cane in his right while murmuring words in something that sounded like Latin.


	4. Chapter 4

**I**

A relentless crowbar of sunlight pried upon the safe of Raven's eyes. She rolled over and tugged the blanket over her, trying to block out the morning glare and sink back into peaceful unconsciousness. She halted and groaned, brought to full awareness by a sense of discomfort. Something was wrong. She felt achy and cramped. The blanket didn't seem to cover her properly. Her throat was dry and the aftertaste of gingerbread was thick in her mouth. The bedsprings squeaked and whined disconcertingly. Bedsprings? She slept on a futon…

Yesterdays events came flooding back in a painful rush of awareness. Hints and inklings bubbled up from her subconscious. She arched her back and lethargically rose, feeling an unfamiliar pinching sensation. She yawned spaciously while bending and flailing. She smacked her lips, scratched in a few places that decency does not permit me to report, and let loose a few loud, tickling blasts of early morning flatulence. A few more bubbles of alertness trickled in from the depths of her id, something about the odd feel of her flesh and the tightness of her clothes, causing her to open her eyes and look down.

"Ooohhh bloody home, what HAPPENED to me?"

The first thing she saw was the area closest to her head. She wasn't exactly sure, but it looked like she had gone up a cup size. With some approval she noted that the elastic design of her one-piece stretched easily to accommodate the growth without visible strain. Beneath them, the situation intensified. Her stomach widened out in a puffy slope, a rounded trapezoid protruding against her belt like a novelty throw-pillow. It squeezed into two halves, painfully restrained by the bronze baldric encircling it. Her stomach was hanging against a pair of full thick thighs. By far however, the biggest bit of all was her callipygian can, straining spandex to new limits.  
As she drooped out of bed and onto the cold department store floor, she heard a sound like a chainsaw hitting a fake Christmas tree.

"Terra?" Raven thought aloud, staring with incredulity at the undulating blanketed bulk before her. This surely was the source of the reverberating waterfall of cacophony that, for lack of a more sublimely evocative and appropriately potent word, could be called "snoring". It was too now too deep to really be a sound, more a visible ripple in the texture of the air and a bone-churning shockwave that tickled the bowels. The heavy mass of overlapping coverlets and counterpanes swelled and shrunk like the bladder of an alcoholic incontinent elephant, occasionally granting the meanest glimpse of long blond hair dispersed about like the contents of an exploded cheese-whiz can. Raven carefully edged a few feet back, lest her cape get caught in the pneumatic vortex. Raven was just about to cover her head in a sound-proof telekinetic bubble when the figure jerked upright with rigid alertness. The mass that somewhere contained Terra sniffed, and then said, with a combination of there's-a-building-falling-on-you urgency, curious incredulity, and pantaloon scorching desire, said  
"Donuts?"

A bell chimed as the door swung open. Starfire drifted in. She was partially obscured by an assortment of large packages, but from what was visible there was a lot more of her to obscure. Two orange thighs swung below straining paper bags, edged by hints of purple from the rippling skirt. A tray of coffee cups jostled against a few inches of skin that had not protruded before. After much twisting, adjusting, and straining, a pair of emerald eyes peeked out between orange hair and Starfire deposited her burden with an air of contained glee.

"Good morning friends Terra and Raven! I have come to you bearing the nuts of dough, fried chicken-fetus sandwiches, and hot percolations of beans for us to break our fast!"  
Starfire's wide grin shone in reflected light, her pure pearly teeth shining with a matte glow and stretching mandibles glinting like green lizards.

When Raven looked at Starfire, she noticed several different things about her.

To begin with, there was her stomach. It was there. Not merely a patch of torso-space in between the chest and the hips, but a definite gut. It was wider than it was tall, puffing into love handles at the side, stretching out eight inches near the middle with only a faint indent in lue of a belly button. Her skirt was buoyed by a modest bubble-butt, set atop thick thighs. Her chest was without visible development, outshined by her arms which had nearly doubled their width.

Raven observed all of these things in less than a second. She thought of a dozen things she could say, and settled on dignified silence.

Terra stared at Starfire. There was something different about her, but she couldn't say what. Then she sniffed the air, remembering something very important.  
"Donuts?", she repeated, a little insistently.

"Yes friend Terra," Starfire said, raising a bag of donuts, "Now, let us"  
*GLOMPH*  
Starfire gave a small yelp. Terra had her mouth closed around the bag of donuts and, unfortunately, Starfire's hand. Terra's face was fixed with a look of moronic glee.  
Starfire let loose a small spurt of Tamaranian expletives as she waved her arm rapidly to try to shake the blond biter loose while Terra chewed and sucked contentedly. She finally dislodged the lamprey-like lass with a particularly violent thrust of her arm and sent Terra sprawling.

Starfire gingerly rubbed her hand. Terra's face yielded a puzzled frown as she hiccupped out the empty bag. "Hey…I'm sitting…on the floor, and I don't feel my hip-bones grinding against the bare floor." She slowly got up, and her hand brushed against her abdomen. She poked, and then inquisitively squeezed her side with gloved fingers. "Hey…I can't reach all the way around my waist with one hand. I can't reach around my waist with both hands!" She moved her hands further. "What…what are these round saggy things on my chest?" Terra gaped, her mind trying to make sense of the information her eyes and hands where sending her.

Raven's mouth angled into a hint of a smirk. Starfire pointed to a nearby mirror-column. Terra frowned and stared. She looked at her arm and waved it experimentally, then watched the arm-fat jiggle a little afterwards. She rubbed her hands down her thick thighs, her butt bulging against her amber short-shorts and threatening to negate her decency, patting her protruding paunch. She delicately probed her newly-gained recognizable chest, and pulled at her puffy cheeks as if expecting them to come off like monster-movie prosthetics.

"I'm…fat." She said blankly.

She paused for a moment, staring into her own blue eyes.

"Cool! Let's eat!"

**II**

After what seemed like hours of intensive chewing of the foul, inorganic substance commonly referred to as "black licorice", Robin, Cyborg, and Beast Boy managed to wrench their way free. They had barely begun looking for a way out when a sharp six-fingered fist of pain drove into their stomachs and stayed their. Robin and Boy fell to their elbows(7) while Cyborg clutched at the general viscinity of what there was enough organic material left of to call "his stomach".

There were a series of leisurely clackings of shoes on polished floor. They rapidly approached without apparent effort, growing in volume. There was a certain echoing resonance about them that suggested the entire vast building they were in was empty.

"Well well well. It looks as if the red red Robin is trying to fly the coop, along with his grass stain and spare parts companions. You didn't honestly think I would tie you up with something **edible** and not include a failsafe device did you?" Weird Wally chided.

"I've seen bett-urk, b-better villains do stupider things(8)," Robin retorted through clenched teeth.

"I tt-tried to tell you," said Beast Boy, with a hint of martyring passive-aggressive whine in his voice. "It was coated with cough syrup and lucky charms, an i-ip-LUUURRK!"  
Beast Boy punctuated his sentence by spraying out a tan-ochre slime with off-white chunks and bits of corn.  
"Ipecac?" the sinister sweet-seller supplied.  
"BluuuUuuhK," Beast Boy replied.  
"Titans, G-RAAACK" Robin heaved in mid-statement. Retching and puking, Robin and Beast Boy were easily pinned by a couple of gingerbread men. Cyborg seemed to be holding his ground, struggling to choke back bile, gears grinding, standing rigid with concentration, until Wally gave him a gentle poke with the candy cane. Then he pulled a Linda Blair and toppled over like a two-legged chair.

Within seconds the titan trio found themselves bound hand and foot. Their legs were tied together with unforgiving knots of some sticky material in eye-squelching bright colors. Their corded hands where held apart by what appeared to be a twenty pound bar of chocolate but, judging by its durability, may have been a cleverly disguised steel girder. An unseen hook attached to their backs suspending them by long industrial-strength polymer chords from some kind of overhead conveyer-belt. It moved them slowly but jerkily, leaving the adolescent assembly to swing and rotate like disgruntled wind chimes.

Beast Boy moped pathetically, with the deflated expression of a clinically depressed basset-hound. Cyborg grunted and steamed, his iron fingers scrabbling furiously at the dense dark chocolate slab. Every now and then he managed to scrape of a pathetic mote of chocolate, or wear a crack or fracture in the sturdy substance that a dwarf flea would not be able to stick its leg into. Robin didn't struggle, or whimper. He stared. He spun gently but inevitably, with no more control over his position than a leaf in the wind.

___________________________________________________  
(7)If you think I am going to use the phrase "fell on his back" or "went down on his knees", and thus open myself to the same keyword-based abuse employed by high school students for cheap laughs at the lunch table when reading phrases out of context that J. K. Rowling has gone through, you would be dead wrong.  
(8)For example, when Calendar Man went around committing crimes on thanksgiving dressed as a giant turkey

**III**

"Ugh."  
Raven had an expression on her face that might be worn by an elite well-bred cigar connoisure at a pig-manure encrusted farmer's offer of "chaw". She regarded the "donuts" before her with mild revulsion. People today simply had no sense of taste.  
Nearly every one was some oversweetened pastry, machine-injected to the bursting point with synthetic sugar-goo congealed from materials boiled off of unrefined petroleum. A Jelly donut or Cream Donut or Chocolate filled (they were all the same to her) was to a really good pastry what a quick rub up against a washing machine during the right cycle was to a night of intimate romance.

"So", Terra said, an éclair wedged into each bulging cheek and another on the way, dribbles of cream filling squirting out through the corners of her mouth, "Wha oo you hink ha-en ere?"  
"I am also curious *mph* as to what has *ulp* happened here. *chomph* What happened *glp* to all of the people and *mrk* to the city in *urp* which we live?", Starfire said in between bites, grabbing each pastry with her mandibles and moistening them with a predigestive salivary agent before swallowing them in two or three bites.

Raven frowned, staring down pensively and poking herself. "Huh?"  
"What has occurred?" Starfire repeated patiently, trying to suppress the shrill whine of panic. "Where have all the people gone? Where are Robin and Beast Boy and Cyborg? What will become of them?! What force has transformed the appearance of our city? Whom or what is the controlling force behind the delicious but unyielding adversaries we faced?"  
Raven sighed and adjusted her belt, loosening it to let her stomach bulge out against the spandex of her costume. "I don't know," she said flatly.  
"What? What do you mean 'I don't know'? You understand all this supernatural mumbo jumbo and occult creepy crap," Terra spouted accusatorily.  
"I mean I don't know. I'm a sorceress, I'm not omniscient. I don't know who's doing this, or what it means. All I know is that it involves magic and desserts, and that's from direct observation."

At this point, the conversation lapsed into a vaguely uncomfortable pause. Terra, out of a near-compulsive urge to break the awkward silence, said enthusiastically,  
"Wanna see how many éclairs I can fit in my mouth?"  
"No." Raven said, in the precise tone she used to make Beast Boy go from showing off his latest prop comedy involving an Al Gore plush doll, a rubber mallet, and a diaper to hiding underneath the sofa in three seconds flat. It was tone as cold and inevitable as the grave. It allowed for no argument. It was as final and drastic as a hydrogen bomb.

Terra thought for about two seconds, and then tried to see how many éclairs she could fit into her mouth anyway.(9)

Terra and Starfire resumed silently(10) eating, while Raven stared down in disgust. Honestly, how could they shovel that synthesized crap into their mouths? Did their tastebuds just go numb after a while so that only the strongest industrial-grade sugar compounds could tickle their senses? Just look at them. Terra was cramming every éclair, pastry, and muffin she could get her hands on, stuffing her face so fast her hands looked like arcs of tan lightning. Starfire had finished off the last of the glazed donuts and moved on a to a cream-filled, her eyes enlarging and turning golden, her ears drippling something purple and caustic-looking, nose discharging steam and small-  
"Starfire?" Raven asked, and gave a sigh of lamentation at having to utter a moronic cliché, no matter how necessary, "are you alright?"

Starfire answered by giving a whimpering noise like a dying mackerel, turned turquoise, and fell over sideways. She didn't crumple or stagger or give any sort of warning or yield, she just fell over like a dead tree, even landing with a dull thunking sound. Her eyes sparkled alarmingly, each compound facet reflecting a different color, and phosphorescent foam came bubbling out of her mouth.

_I'll take that as a no,_ Raven thought as she bent over the altered alien. She had just reached into her inner peace to draw on a healing spell when Starfire's limbs jerked into improbable positions and one of them struck her on the hand. This being Starfire, the strength of the blow sent Raven flying twenty-three feet to smack against a near by wardrobe. As Raven recovered her breath and sealed her fractures, her attention turned to Terra, who currently had all her attention focused on cramming twelve bear claws into her maw at once.  
"Terra!" Raven shouted, wincing as she levitated herself out of the clothing container, an old shoe embedded in her left ear.  
"Ah?" Terra said, turning briefly as she squeezed in number thirteen.  
"DO SOMETHING! Hold Starfire down so I can help her!"  
"Hoor," Terra said.  
"What?" Raven asked  
"I he, hoor!"  
"I can't understand you with all those donuts in your mouth!" Raven shouted. Starfire was crawling backwards exorcist-style and had begun to cough up a rather important-looking pump-like organ.  
Terra chewed thoughtfully for a few agonizing moments, then with great effort swallowed the mass of partially masticated pastries.  
"I said, sure I'll help," Terra annunciated with tedious preciseness. She then flicked her eyeballs in the direction of Starfire, gave a glowing yellow wink, and tendrils of sandy loam bound her so efficiently that she couldn't so much as wiggle her nose. Raven gave a small, soft sound that could have been a reluctant "thanks" or merely a clearing of the throat, then floated over to Starfire and placed a hand to her. She muttered a short chant, simple and repetitive but differing greatly from her usual thaumaturgical repertoire of "Azerath, Metrion, Zynthos", and a soft blue glow diluted throughout the expansive form. Starfire's body temperature dropped form 170 degrees celcius to the normal 50-63 degree range, her skin turned back to a healthy orange, her eyes were clear, and her hair stopped itching. The half-demon healer gave a small sigh of relief and nodded to Terra, who removed the earthen restraints.

"What happened?" Terra asked, an expression trickling over her face that could have been concern or intestinal discomfort.  
"The nut of dough, it was…poisoned." Starfire said.  
"Poisoned?!" Terra squealed in alarm. She had already eaten nine of the cream-filled ones.  
"Are you sure?" Raven said.  
"What do you mean?" Starfire asked. "If I was not sure, I would not say it had occurred."  
"Well, the thought occurs to me, maybe it's poisonous to you, but normal dietary material for humans. I mean, we already know that Tamaranians metabolize some chemicals differently(11). Maybe you just don't digest cream filling well and earth-people do."  
"But…but that's impossible. No organic life can digest carbonated synthesized sugar compounds. It's practically the antithesis of life. A carbon-based organism that eats that..that _stuff_ and lives is like a bird with nitroglycerin for blood or burrowing animal that breathes hydrogen. It's not feasible."

Raven grasped the half-donut Starfire had dropped during her convulsions. She took a large bite out of it, chewed, and swallowed. "A little too sweet, but no harm done."  
Starfire looked at Raven and blinked.  
"Oh. I guess I was wrong then."

Then the wall exploded.

(9)Seven.  
(10)Silently in the sense of "not talking". The combined duet of chomps, gulps, swallows, belches, and hiccups was enough to drown out an argument between two irate cab drivers.  
(11) They learned this from a nearly fatal incident when Starfire tried to share some of her home-made arsenic curry.

**IV**

The first thing that hit them was the smell. Well, that's not literally accurate. The first thing that hit them was a spray of wallpaper and plaster. But the first thing that Raven, Starfire, and Terra noticed about the hulking presence that had suddenly entered the building was the smell. It was heavier than a bull elephant with a glandular condition. It was richer than a petroleum magnate. It was sweeter than revenge involving crazy glue and farm animals.

It was the smell of chocolate.

Through the euphoric aroma and the choking plaster dust, it took a few seconds for the young titans to take in the…thing. That was the only word to describe it. There were two legs, pillars of shining brown density, and what might have been arms, crude appendages spouting in short hard angles to end in two or three finger-claws, and a vaguely pyramidal protrusion suggested a head. The whole thing had the cumbrous, biologically unfeasible appearance of a corny Japanese monster. It _looked_ like something named "Ko-kori, The Terror-Beast from Beyond Neptune!". Its physique suggested the speed and maneuverability of the Lincoln Memorial. Every crude feature and awkward limb bespoke something that wouldn't hold together, something that couldn't move thanks to the ratios of muscular strength and three-dimensional space; this thing simply could not be.

It was. The fact that it looked too clumsy to move, that it would make you laugh so hard you sprayed soda out your nose if you saw it lumbering across a screen on the SciFi channel, made it all the more horrible. No matter how cheesy or comical in appearance it might be, it was here, it was now, it was not computer animation or a stop-motion model or a man in a suit. The inescapable reality eliminated all trace of humor or whimsy.

It raised its leg, a leg which had no joints or tendons to speak of, and stepped forward. Tiles cracked. A section of the mirror-ceiling shattered as the pointed end of the "head" made contact with it on the upward swing of the lurch, spattering it with a shower of glass.

Starfire rose to confront the oncoming threat.

**V**

There was a change to the texture of the air. Maybe it was the breeze coming in through the demolished wall. Maybe it was the last of the plaster settling. The two overlapping pits of yellow seemed to get a little bit brighter when The Smell hit them.

It was too much for a nose. The sensory information flooded the olfactory system and carried over into the nooks and crannies of the cerebral cortex, playing the reward triangle like a tuning fork, assaulting the emotions and neurons responsible for threat assessment. It ran through Starfire's over-ambitious-spinal chord of a nervous system like water through a pipe.

A rolling stream of sensation shot through Raven's mindscape like a bullet train. Lesser facets like Rudeness and Intellectualism where either knocked aside or mowed down into a metaphysical pancake. Meeting its target, the chain of feeling wrapped around the pink-clad Raven doppleganger that was a personification of the half-demon's happiness. It spiraled down into her in a psychological flare of action, like a reverse-footage sneeze, and then Happiness began to change. Her grin spread wider, to a dopey, vacant, possibly psychopathic expression; eyes glazed over and one was replaced with a borg-esque lazer-sight device, a left hand sharpened into a mechanical claw with a heartgram on it; and a tank of dark-brown fluid with the label "CHOCOLATE" and a tube running to the base of her skull completed the metaphor.

"Rage will consume you!" Roared a flickering figure, alternating between the demon-form of Trigon the Terrible and a four-eyed red-cloaked version of Raven. Happiness replied with a grin that was too wide, had too many teeth, and a small gush of the sweet liquid coarsed into her head. Happiness doubled her size at the speed of thought, and a small eruption of flowers and butterflies coated the floating island on which she stood. Even as the personification of anger dropped its demonic disguise, shrank, and turned to flee, the metal claw shot forward and locked it in a steel-grip. Happyness crammed the figure of rage down her mouth like a fig newton and swallowed it without so much as a burp.

Eagerly Happiness flew off to the next floating platform, the flowers and butterflies spreading with her like a plague of prettiness. She landed directly on top of Fear, stuffing down the pallid personification head-first to muffle the screams. She patted her struggling stomach and loosened her belt. Another pulse of symbolic chocolate-fluid traveled from the canister on her back into her noggin, and the essence that was bliss swelled in size by another couple of feet. She smacked her lips, smiled, and bounded off to the next patch of mindscape.  
There was barely a fight as she scarfed sadness, who mumbled about how she probably deserved to be eaten, and she was sorry for everything. The incarnation of bliss was flossing her teeth with sorrow's slate-grey robes when green-clad courage strode in claiming she could take her any day. The flying kick would have surely shattered Happiness's jaw if the expanding emotion hadn't chosen the perfect moment to open her mouth.

Embarrassment, Ennui, That Feeling You Get When You Have A Sneeze Coming But It Just Stops, all of the lesser facets and feelings where gobbled up by ravening Happiness. Before she knew what was happening Raven was entirely engulfed by the all-consuming chocolate-fueled joy.

Starfire floated aimlessly, drowning in a sea of larval bliss. Raven felt her power wind down and her complex mental defenses melt in bio-chemical comfort food euphoria. Terra snorted every air molecule she could stuff into her lungs, greedily taking in every last hint of that heavenly aroma.

"Chocolate..." she said, with breathiness like a keening lover. While the others swam in pleasure, she floated to the top and scanned eagerly for deeper seas. Her brain was out to lunch, but her nose had correctly identified the component substance of the monstrous megalith before her, and her hand and mouth had long ago agreed that where chocolate is concerned, there was no need to involve the brain. She lumbered forward, arms extended, eyes glazed, rivulets of drool moistening her shirt and creating a splattered trail, a figure of unthinking purpose to match the terrible bulk.

With spasmic swiftness, she springboarded herself onto the Hershey's Hulk with a small geyser of earth. Hair rippling like flaxen fire in freefall, she landed sprawled against the mass. Hard chocolate struck soft flesh. She set upon the sugary structure with demonic intensity, like a shrew trying to gnaw down an oak tree. The Thing did not seem to take any notice of this fragile parasite, nibbling inch-long shards of its body and licking with savage intensity, but the turn of events provoked a mental struggle in the complacent Starfire and the resting Raven.

As the trickle of new information penetrated the haze of happiness, the fungible awareness highest in Starfire's neural chain of alertness shook itself free of the chocolate enchantment. It set about reminding her other nodes of thought that her city was under attack, that Robin, Cyborg, and Beast Boy where in unknown peril, and at this very moment there was a colossal construct advancing on her and her friends with hostile intent. Within seconds the whole of her consciousness was returned to reality.

Inside Raven's head, a magenta-mantled monolith of a girl sat, radiating content. She would have been twenty feet tall if size meant anything here. Her spandex suit had long ago burst, and she would be immobilized by her girth if gravity had existed where she sat. Her flabby arms where drooped over her massive grey gut, her hefty hind-quarters bulging out, thick thighs splayed, and her chubby-cheeked utterly content face rested against her plumpened chest, which in turn was dolloped over her massive sphere of a belly. It gurgled and churned, occasionally jiggling from the diminishing token struggles of its quasi-conscious contents and symbolic digestion. These fading and pathetic efforts always ended in nothing more than a resounding burp or a few hiccups.

Then there was a groan. A massive gurgle shook her swollen stomach. Happiness gave a few throaty belches, and then a gulp of discomfort, trying to quell a rising nausea. The trickle of discomfort rose to a churning pain, a throbbing indigestion, and with a huge bile-flavored belch, an arm punched triumphantly out of her mouth. Raven flew out, a bit sticky but otherwise unharmed. Before the hulking Happiness could do anything about it, she yanked the clear plastic chord from the candy container. The euphoric giantess gave a sheepish grin of dismay, and then began shrinking, thinning away while her stomach got more stretched and transparent, before vanishing with a little flicker to liberate her feast of feelings.

The observable outcome was that Raven opened her eyes, pinched her nose, and took a cleansing breath.

Starfire's whole body rose up a few feet, tensed like a grasshopper ready to spring, and shot out at the chocolate behemoth. While she melted it away with eye beams and starblasts, she kicked at it with legs like jackhammers and scraped off all that she could with her madly moving mandibles.

The massive Thing took notice. It bent slightly, taking stock of the two meat-creatures furiously focused on bringing about its demolition. It raised a rigid limb to strike the two pests from its form. Raven chose that moment to attack.

**V**

Instead telekinetic energy, Raven employed a straightforward blast of eldritch power. She could feel the uncanny resilience of the Thing, battling her will, holding off her magic. Raven pressed on, flying forward and swooping around it like a thaumaturgically-gifted hornet, until directly behind it she managed to find a weak point and pressed.  
The geyser of energy struck hard, parting the magical resistance like Moses separating the red sea. In the monolithic physical density of the chocolate monster fractures began to form. Raven pumped two thirds of all her mystic might into one blast. The back cracked mightily, the shoulder began to splinter, and the wind roared past her, lashing her face with her cloak.  
The moment this physical intelligence reached her brain she reassessed the situation. On second thought, maybe she had put a little too much power into this attack, given that she was now flying backwards at upwards of forty miles an hour, the department store receding as the chocolate Thing shrank to a brown dot. Just as she raised defensive buffer to slow her movement and prevent a collision, her head smacked straight against six inches of building-quality concrete. Her concentration scattered and whiteness obliterated her world.

**VI**

The great umber claw came at Terra and Starfire like a horizontal avalanche. Terra deftly leapt aside to latch on to one of the imitation-fingers, while Starfire's rigid muscles and internal carapace held back the brown death. The Thing had been badly cracked by Raven's blast; It was smoking and even aflame in some places, and one of its arms had broken off, but its actions pointed towards a creation devoid of pain and fear. Terra furiously ate, her jaws aching, her teeth throbbing, continuing her struggle against a surface brittle as glass but hard as steel. The Thing raised her to a place directly in front of its saffron stare. The shining centers glowed to nova-intensity, while the surrounding area shone like a noon sun. A ripple of power passed through Terra, and her skin crawled. Disjointed snatches of music and words coursed over her, and her body glowed a thousand hues before settling on the dark shiny brown of her attacker. Just before her fluid form hardened into a chocolate statue, she whimpered out "Oh no, not again!"  
The arm rotated 540 degrees and let go. The chocolate statue that was Terra hurtled into the horizon.

**VII**

Starfire screamed with righteous fury in what would have seemed like a soundless mouthing to humans but would deafen every dog and bats for a three-mile radius. She reared back through the air, adjusting her position, careful to avoid letting those yellow sight-splotches anywhere near her field of vision, and plowed forward straight at the dead-center of the creature. She prepared man-sized starbolts. She closed here eyes and powered up until the green glow shone through her three sets of lids, she opened wide to extend her mandibles and show all four sets of teeth, and attacked.

She scored direct hits. The chocolate bulk cracked and burned, but at just the wrong moment the remaining claw swung down and over to redirect Starfire's inertia. She was set flying out through the far left wall.


	5. Chapter 5

**I**

While the three female members of the Teen Titans where sent hurtling by a chocolate behemoth to various unknown fates, their y-chromosome gifted counterparts still swung helplessly in the metaphoric clutches of Weird Wally like so many moody wind-chimes.  
Judging from the glimpses they recieved of their captor during slow but nauseating rotations, Weird Wally was engaged in a tactful but passionate conversation with a chocolate bar. Robin began to wonder if they were dealing with a serious headcase. He'd met them before. Oh yes, there was the Joker, but truth be told that clown wasn't a real crackpot. He had that special criminal insanity possessed only by very sane criminals. He had no regard for law and order, yet he managed to recognize how much he could push before the high-voltage furniture became a serious probability.  
The Joker had curious obsessions with certain themes, but then again what criminal or hero didn't?(12) Nearly everybody had some peculiar fascination, just because you tried to rob a bank with devil masks and flamethrowers didn't mean you were any loonier than the people who did it with revolvers and black socks on their heads. No, the Joker was as sane as the average television repairmen; Just substitute the curious preference for pants three sizes to small and a woeful lack of lower abdominal hygiene for a creepy laugh and there you are. The Joker was simply evil, and he had enough guile to fool psychiatrists who used little check-lists and Rorschach interpretations and equated science fiction creatures with metaphors for subliminal fears and Jungian shadows, the kind of people who rarely made contact with any human not lying on a couch.

What was this deep-set misapprehension within the minds of sensibly-dressed wage-earners and law-enforcement upper levels that insane and evil were more or less interchangeable? Evil people were those who acted in their own interests and weren't to particular about who they harmed to achieve them. Insane people were practically defined by the fact that they didn't act in their own interests. Forming elaborate plans was arrogant or silly, but not lunatic. A lunatic isn't a person who tries to execute their nemesis by lowering him into a vat of lava with an unnecessarily slow dipping machine. An insane person tries to execute their nemesis by slapping them repeatedly with a dead haddock. An insane person doesn't just fight the policemen trying to catch them. That's common sense. It's an insane person who attacks not only the hero trying to take them down, but their current and still useful ally, some random bystanders, their own loyal henchmen, and a potted fig tree. Insanity is not holding long, revealing monologues with your captives; that's natural grandstanding, a combination of inner desire to confess and vanity. Robin wasn't sure, but he surmised that if he created an elaborate device to kill somebody that involved said person's secret weakness, million-dollar components stolen from three separate continents, and months of planning in solitary confinement, he'd want to brag about it to. The insane person holds these lengthy discussions with a severed head or a coffee machine. Insane people screw up. They bite their own hands off, gibber and run around in circles, or just stare into space. The Riddler gave away clues to his own tricks, but that might be more bragging, because he knew he was so smart that nobody would figure it out.

The Creeper, now that was a lunatic. Well-off news reporter decides to run around in underpants and a feather boa fighting crime. Even that _might_ pass for normal in Metropolis or Gotham. Likewise repeatedly coming on to a girl who hits you with a weighty mallet could pass as normal for a lonely drunk or some wimpy japanese guy in a harem manga, but put them all together and you get a significantly whacked-out fellow. Again, note the difference between insane and evil. Lunatics were rarely self-preserving, either because they thought they could fly or were sure they were the divinely empowered reincarnation of Voltaire destined to save the world. Perhaps the best example was, oh, what was his name. Some guy who invented a device that shot lightning and thought he was Zeus. He didn't always act in his interests because he thought he was invincible; he welcomed Batman the first time mistaking him for Hades and freely discussed some key "mortal matters", and he was perhaps the only inmate who never tried to escape Arkham because he thought it was Mount Olympus.

Robin retched thoughtfully. All this spinning was making him dizzy, and he had a weak stomach for introspective considerations at the best of time. He continued spittering lost bits of last tuesday's breakfast, weak trickles of bile, and swallowed saliva until his bellicose stomach admitted that he really didn't have anything left to throw up.

He turned his tiring brain to the matter at hand. Weird Wally probably wasn't a true nutter. All of this had too much planning and fail-safes to be the work of somebody who spent large amounts of time drooling and head-butting walls. Something about this man seemed too showy, as if his Vegas-style Wonka/Dr. Evil hybrid personality was a surface for something beyond scrutiny, something inimical and alien. His proportions seemed wrong, as if somebody had heard of a human shape but didn't have access to any decent photographs or books of anatomy. It was like the figure he saw was a cartoon-animation, each frame hand-drawn by a very skilled but less-than-perfect illustrator, so that sometimes the arm-to-leg ratio didn't quite match up between one millisecond and another, or the height changed, or the suit wasn't a dark enough purple.

Robin retched again, and blinked away some moistening tears. That person was bad for the eyes.

Robin started thinking again, trying to keep his mind from wandering in his state of discomfort and exhaustion, easing his train of thought along like a student driver. He tried to keep his neurons firing in the right direction with the exaggerated care of a drunk trying to walk a straight line, calling on all his reserves of mental discipline to work something out.

He was stuck.

There was no question of this. As a sidekick he had learned over the years how to squeeze, wriggle, and bend out of every trap imaginable, from telephone chords to robot dinosaurs. He'd even managed to untie a knot without using his arms, and dial a phone with his hair(13). He could make Houdini look like a kid with plastic handcuffs, and in terms of escape procedure he was honestly stumped.

Having reached that conclusion, he could now proceed to phase two. You're in the bad guy's lair, make some use of your position. Learn things until some ally or freak occurrence rescues you, so that when you're out of the fix you have something to act on.  
He didn't think that much could be gleaned from his immediate surroundings. There was candy involved, probably some large nondescript building, and beyond that nothing useful. He didn't know if this was an abandoned warehouse or an offshore oil rig, and the vast sucrotopia around him would muffle any outside noises. He didn't have any idea how Wally's stuff operated, and he didn't see any handy, large red "self-destruct" button.

He couldn't learn anything from the area around him, but maybe he could glean key factoids from the Wonka Wannabe himself. After all, he looked like the monologue-prone type.

"Hey, moron(14), what do you think you're trying to do here anyway?"

If Robin hadn't been held rigidly in place, he would have swayed drunkenly. As it is his head just lolled in an improbable manner. Even as the words left his throat, scratchy from dehydration and soar from bile and stomach acid, it occurred to him that his rapier wit had been considerably dulled by his current condition. He wondered if he would even understand anything his captor foolishly revealed.

"I beg your pardon?" Weird Wally said, not turning from his careful scrutiny of the candy-bar foil.

"Er, yer up to something aren't you, right?" Robin felt blood struggle to his face, higher functions gripped with the inner horror that comes over a person when they realize that their mouth has lost faith in their brain and intends to go on without it. "I mean...plans. You've got a plan. What's this...this stuff all about?"

The sinister sugar-specialist slowly folded up the chocolate bar's wrapping over it with both hands, then put it in his coat pocket, without ever taking his hand off of his candy-cane.  
"Oh, I think I see."  
Wally nodded thoughtfully and craned his neck to face the Boy Wonder.  
"You're expecting me to go all James Bond villain and say 'Well, you're going to die anyway, so I'll reveal the single, easily-exploitable flaw in my evil plot.'"  
Robin face flickered between hopeful look and nervous grin, then decided to take a cue from the rest of his body and sag listlessly.

"Does it not occur to you," he said, strolling around his suspension device with a leisurely pace, so that he kept facing Robin despite the gentle spin, "that the 'bad guys' have seen James Bond movies too?"

His voice took on a sharper tone.

"I may have a deal of confidence in my ability, but I'm not stupid enough to assume that I am infallible. If I tell you my precise intentions, there is a chance that you will at some future point escape, and thusly be able to take advantage of my ramblings to defeat me. If I do ever get the urge to rattle of the secret workings of my operation, I will at least divulge them to a trusted assistant, preferably one who is least likely to repeat them." He nodded at the figure of the cookie man, who hadn't been there a few seconds ago.

"However, it would not be unwise for me to at least reveal my motives, if not my means."  
Cyborg and Beast Boy Perked up their ears and leaned their heads towards Weird Wally, drawn out of whatever internal meditations they had been engaged in.

Weird Wally slowly unwrapped a small hard candy and tossed it into the air. It stayed there.  
"I came here from...elsewhere, with the intention of gaining a kingdom. I'm not some megalomaniac who wants to rule the world or control the universe mind you. I just wanted a little place, somewhere to overtake and make my own."  
He snapped his fingers and the hard candy came back down. He closed his fist around it.  
"Now, I didn't want any old place. Your city proved to be...interesting, a good, varied population. A better kind of 'human stock' if you will, neither the bland homo sapiens of, say, Philadelphia, nor the unpleasant, fish-smelling cultists of Innsmouth, nor the extreme urban squalor of New York. A place and a people I could get used to."  
He flicked up the hard candy again and spun it on his finger. It was a different color now.  
A thought roamed through Beast Boy's brain, frightened and lonely.  
"But...didn't you kill everyone...or try...with that...big, sticky, wave thing?"

Wally blinked. His hand jerked away in surprise, but the hard candy held its position and continued spinning.  
"What what? No, no my boy. They are all perfectly preserved, sealed away by my cryogenic caramel, ready to be woken up and...put to use."

**II**

He caught the candy again, and opened his hand to reveal a licorice whip. He made a complicated gesture with the bit of foul tar-like candy, and an enormous box of chocolates was wheeled in by a company of gingerbread men.

"Even the most potent disasters, whether natural events or deliberate acts, will leave a few survivors. Whether by unique adaptation, cleverness, or mere chance, a fraction of the populace has escaped the amber embrace. As soon as I eliminate all these Rebel Elements, through a variety of means, the city will be mine."

With a flourish of his hand, the licorice became a hammer constructed of solid chocolate. The gingerbread men lifted the box upright and opened it. Instead of a variety of enticing treats, fruit and nut bits, a milk chocolate centerpiece, and some little weird things that nobody would ever eat intentionally or voluntarily(15), they were presented with three rectangular prisms of caramel. They were translucent enough to show the presence of figures in them, but no clear details could be made out. The first one was short, nearly a 2ft cube. The next was long and thin, nearly six feet in height and barely a foot wide, and the third one was of massive size, just clear enough to suggest somebody of rectangular proportions.

Weird Wally tossed the hammer to the cookie-dough creature, who deftly smashed the first cube. The caramel shards yielded the unconscious figure of Gizmo, evil midget and one of the core members of the often-inaccurately named "Hive Five". Before so much as a groan escaped his lips the cookie man snatched off his high-tech backpack and smashed it with the hammer(16), then bound him to the spot with a glob of dough. The confectionary construct moved on to shatter the tall amber chamber that held Jinx, the hive-five sorceress with bad-luck beams. She managed to rise to a groggy wakefulness and struggle into an upright position before she was pinned to the floor with a double-blast of sticky cookie dough. Weird Wally deftly slapped a loose loop of what looked like twisted fruit-roll-up over her hands. Mammoth, the muscle of the group, took two hammer-strikes to liberate, and reflexively swung out at the cookie man before he was pinned by a blast of dough at each limb and a strong whap on the head.

The cruel candyman drew a few hexagons on the ground with his cane, and all three of the villains found the six-sided sections of floor to which they were pinned detach and float into the air. Wally skipped over to another section of the building, and with an impatient wave of his candy-cane the hooks suspending the titans and the platforms holding the Hivers shot along after him.

___________________________________________  
(12)Jean Grey.  
(13)Large amounts of brilcream were involved  
(14)Not exactly a biting insult of caustic wit, but in his defense Robin was a little woozy from all the dry heaves and quasi-crucifixion.  
(15)Roman Nougat would be one of them. That stuff tastes like a mixture of shredded coconut and pidgeon doings.  
(16)Anybody who thinks a tool made of solid chocolate is not capable of smashing a device made of futuristic alloys, buy a Ghiradelli's chocolate chunk or giant chocolate bar and just try to bite straight through it. Then try to stomp on it to crack it. Then try to hit it with a hammer. Yeah. You see what I mean.


	6. Chapter 6

**I**

Beast Boy, Cyborg, Gizmo, Jinx, Mammoth, and Robin found themselves all suspended over one of the anonymous vats of bubbling substance. It was frothy white with a curiously familiar odor.

Weird Wally clapped his hands sarcastically and the juvenile jailbirds all arose to full conciousness. Gizmo, predictably, responded to the situation with a string of impassioned but tame swear-substitutes. Mammoth blinked and took his surroundings in. Jynx gave in to cliche and asked "Where are we?"

Weird Wally turned to face them with a dramatic half-spin, and his face lit up like a pinball machine.  
"Welcome to Weird Wally's Candy-Shop of Mystical Wonders! Here you will find Confections to make your mouth water and horrors to make your nightmares come true!"

He held out his candy-cane, opened his hand, and it spun in the air as if pinned to his palm. A couple of gingebread men crossed their candy canes in salute, and a small array of fireworks went of behind them.

"Ralph "Gizmo" Anders, Toby "Jinx" Luther, and Percival "Mammoth" Thompson, you are going to be the first Jump City Residents to recieve my 'treatment'," Wally announced in the tone of somebody informing you that you have won the twenty-thousand dollar shopping spree AND the Mercedez Benz. There was a brief, expectant silence during which the sinister sweet-seller rolled the chocolate hammer into a plain donut, and lowered it into the bubbling vat. When he lifted it out, the donut was covered in a fine frosty sheen, but there was not a drop of the substance upon his hand. He turned to the assembled with an air of exaggerated casuallness and offered the pastry.

"Donut?" he inquired.

Jinx shook her head slowly, then pointed her hands at Wally with the offensive pose of somebody aiming a gun. There was a violet flicker, and then she spasmed and writhed like a worm hit by a staple gun.

Wally pursed his lips and shook his finger in gentle reproach.

"Now now Toby, such violent actions are really quite unwise. If you tried to look before you leap, you would notice that your hands are bound in a fruit-leather mystic mobius strip. The causality-crushing power of this encarceration device twists the uncanny forces to make the use of magical powers by its wearer painful and costly. In addition, this particular unreality-nexus inverts your blasts of bad karma so that the effect is centralized upon you. I believe you have just experienced a minor stroke. Please, do not attempt to exert yourself further."

He turned to Gizmo and proffered the food-loop.  
"Glazed donut?"  
Gizmo responded with a typical angry retort accusing Weird Wally of ingesting his own nasal emissions. Wally shrugged and moved on to Mammoth.  
"Glazed donut?"  
Mammoth shook his head emphatically.

"Very well then."  
Weird Wally walked away, then spun to face them again without moving his legs.

"Do you believe in magic?!" He demanded.

The Hive Three blinked, utterly unsure what to make of the remark. Jinx tried to break the mystic mobius fruit leather and it snapped into two linked rings, smaller and tight around her hands.

"You really don't learn, do you Ms. Luther?" Wally gave a sigh of parental disappointment.

"I ask because magic, is a trick really. The students of Jung and Freud interpret books of fantasy and mythology all wrong. Magic isn't symbolic of something, of vicarious success or subconcious events. Magic IS symbolisms. It's about things that connect in a mental way, about imagery and word-play."  
He bit into the donut, delicately clipping it off one small bite at a time, leaving not a crumb on his lip nor a fleck of glaze on his cheek.

"Tell me, are you familiar with the expression 'glazed eyes'?"

**II**

Raven groaned; it was that special groan that preceded a reluctant return consciousness. This groan had come before any number of classic rhetorical questions, from the befuddled "Where am I?" to the exclamatory "What did I DO last night?!". Upon hearing her own groan, Raven's subconscious had already primed her defenses; she anticipated a villainous grin and self-important monologue more than the blurred faces of concerned friends.  
The quasi-demonic do-gooder groaned again, this time more out of personal expression than reflex. She was still in the groggy, slothful state of after-sleep. Raven passively took in the sensory details around her: she was wet, sticky, sprawled in an unpleasant position, and lying on something hard. Acting on this intelligence a collection of Raven's numerous facets, feelings, and alter-egos formed a committee on further action. After much deliberation, two adjournments, and Rudeness getting a gavel stuck somewhere unpleasant while attempting a truly hilarious pantomime, they reached a unanimous agreement. This was ratified by the indistinct blob that represented Raven's capacity for waking thought. On the physical plane, a complex network of organic and ectoplasmic nerve cells fired neurons like a startled quail-hunter, a surge of precise and minute currents of electricity surging through intricate patterns to culminate in a decisive action.

Raven sat up and opened her eyes.  
She yawned hugely, sucking in oxygen and ethereal currents to power her rapidly awakening brain. She squirmed into a more comfortable position and scratched herself absentmindedly. Memory of recent events rose like a blood moon. This caused Raven to make the mistake of looking down.  
As soon as she saw the sheered skin and the seven-inch-deep laceration, the pain hit her. It had been patiently knocking at the door her awareness, but now let in it embraced her with the force and fervor of a friendly drunk. Raven wouldn't scream(17), but she gave a little choked-off gurgle of animal agony and an unholy expletive that scorched the concrete in front of her.  
The girl named for a carrion-bird calmed herself and clinically assessed her situation. Judging from the broken windows halfway up the seventeen-story building she had fallen quite a long way. If it hadn't been for the contingency Feather Fall spell she had long ago enchanted herself with, the sarcastic psychic would have been a discolored smear smelling faintly of brimstone. She couldn't cast a healing spell straight off with all this pain muddling her. Instead she reached down and pulled out on of the gems set on her belt. The back was hollow, and revealed a small nodule(18) of gel. It smelled awful, and its ingredients didn't bear repeating(19), but she rubbed it over her scrapes, cuts, and her torn-open thigh. The potent potion acted instantly, soothing the pain, coaxing her flesh to knit and regrow.

The patch of buildings Raven was in had a disturbingly personalized feel. Most of the skyscrapers were fashioned to resemble huge bars of dark chocolate. The streets below had a distinctively gothic theme in violent contrast to the manic cheerfulness the rest of the city had been draped in. Here and their, shop windows or signposts were adorned with stylized representations of her avian namesake. There were even more precise and unnerving touches that seemed to suggest somebody who had pawed through her room. The Jump City theater house had a laughing mask/crying mask that perfectly emulated the one in her room; that mirror on display in the glass shop was nearly identical to her own mind-mirror in design, and…was that a her giant novelty chicken out in front of the butcher store? Also, the giant black banner with blood-red 8ft high letters spelling out "WELCOME RAVEN" had a bit of the uncannily familiar about it too.

Raven's molars ached with the force of an unspoken cliché. She felt that she was being watched.

(18)Raven just wasn't the screaming type. If you let yourself scream, soon you would be murmuring, languishing, and fleeing into the woods in high heels.  
(18)Nodule is a fun word.  
(19)If you must know they were sulfur, goat urine, and human placenta.

**III**

Cyborg had seen a lot of things in his time. He had seen mutilated bodies left in the wake of the undead barely-sentient horror that arose from the bones of a former friend-enemy. He's seen his own rib cage poking out at him. He'd never seen anything quite like this.

It began with a small metal rod, rising out of the bubbling liquid sugar-coating. On it was a small pole at the end, ending in two delicate cups of pooled fluid, no deeper or wider than the dimple on a golf-ball. The candy man was muttering something as he threw a handful of gummi bears onto the Hive Five. The little gummi bears marched along the captives humming a high-pitched and annoyingly discordant variant of "The Teddy Bear's Picnic". The each spread out around the center of each villain's face, two or three to each eyelid, rubbed their paws together until they melted into powerful adhesive at the end, and dutifully reached down and pulled the eyelids apart to force them into wide, tearing, unblinking stares of pain.

Then things got really bad.

Gizmo was the first. A long string of passionate substitute-swears intensified in frequency, emotion, and incoherency as the scalding-hot pools of sucrose neared his retina, and just as it touched the dissolved into a horrible low-pitched gargling howl of deeply human fury and suffering. Mammoth didn't take it as well, screaming in a pitch so high it seemed to oscillate out of the range of human hearing and thrashing violently, gibbering, making pleas to his mother, his god, until he coughed blood from the sheer intolerable pressures his throat nodes were being subjected to. He kept mouthing screams until the hot donut-coating smothered his pupils, and then he went as silent as the grave.  
Cyborg had never realized how brave Jinx was. She didn't scream until the very last, and she kept up a confident stare of defiance until it was inches away from her, and berated the Willy Wonka wannabe with biting trash-talk until she could feel the heat singe her eyelashes.

It was only after it was through with that Cyborg even remembered there were other people around him, drawn out of his transfixed horror. Robin restrained himself to a grave head-shaking, apparently he had seen his share of tortures and this didn't impress him much. Beast Boy on the other hand looked like he was trying to swallow his tongue just so he'd have something to vomit. When he rotated around in his slow spin to face the current company, he noticed something odd. Yes, they'd gone silent, and the now had literally glazed eyes, their retina, pupil, and cornea obscured by a general glassy-white flaking, but there was more to it. They made no cry of pain, no weeping, nothing. They sat there with vacant grins, slowly drooling. They didn't look mind-wiped or pacified, as if they were bodies with no soul or thought to trouble them. Rather they looked as if their essential person had been repressed, buried alive in their own psyche, the pain and torture all the worse for their inability to express it or react.

The capricious candyman fiddled with his cane, and suddenly it had an array of strange lenses, bleeping monitors, antennae, and machines that went "ping". He waved it over Gizmo and frowned thoughtfully. "Well, with your physique there's only one profession open for you. Lessee, I believe I got this off of one of your 'partners in crime', but it looks better on you." He unrolled a leather, cowboy-style belt engraved with a stylized brass B and a sterling silver N. On its back was a strange mesh of oblong crystals and fiber-optic wire, paired with two tiny electrode-spikes. He gently latched it around Gizmo's waist.  
"There there, doesn't our little Ralph look dashing in his fancy getup," he said with a head-rub and condescending tone to make an infantilizing great-aunt blush. Gizmo twitched slightly.  
Wally put on a chocolate-rimmed monocle and frowned at Gizmo. "Now then, nobody likes a one-trick horse of a different color. What do I have to work with here? Obviously we can't use the backpack. Hmm, intelligence isn't much good for a thrall, but maybe…yes."  
He flipped out the candycane and described an elaborate curlicue in the air. "Put that mental energy to use as psionic power. Can't be something ranged like telekinesis or energy-blasts. I know how that goes with large groups of underlings. The 'hero' just flies past and they both wind up shooting each other. Well, how about some neuro-electric current." He nodded approvingly to himself, then sat down cross-legged. There was something terrifying about the way he folded like a Jacob's ladder toy, with the movements of more joints than were properly there, and that odd sucking sensation as if he was compacting a greater form  
His eyes widened and sparkled, and his voice took on a tone of adoring condescension that would have offended a three-year-old. "Now, Gizmo, I want you to tell me your most favoritest candy in the whole wide world."  
Again, there was a small twitch, and then he said as if reading off a cue card in a foreign language "Jaw-bray-kur".  
"Jawbreaker sours is it? Yes, I suppose that's quite appropriate." The cookie man produced a candy of that name and popped it into Gizmo's mouth. For the first tense seconds no change was evident. Then he hiccupped. Then he twitched, more violently. Then he rippled and changed.  
It wasn't that he had slowly transitioned like a werewolf, or been one thing one moment and something else the next. It as if there was some scene change in the film of his existence, like the four-dimensional projector responsible for his reality had just done an acid-dissolve shift on a powerpoint presentation. He was now dressed in ridiculous, dull-colored overalls, still resplendent with belt. His eyes had a nauseating matte-glow like a smoked glass skylight on a cloudy day. His barren head had sprouted a nest of curly arsenic-green hair. Every inch of exposed skin was bright orange.

There was a pregnant pause, and Beast Boy obliterated the streak of silence with a heartfelt exclamation.  
"Holy frellnutters, he's an Oompah-Loompah!"  
The Candy Man inclined his head in a conservative nod.  
"I was hoping one of you would catch that."  
He moved a step over to Mammoth. He rapped a sticatto on the adolescent Goliath's chest and frowned thoughtfully.  
"No real special powers, no particularly intense mental attributes, hmm. It's not very impressive, but I've only got so much to work with."  
Weird Wally's face twisted into a bored expression and he through up his candy cane letting it twirl in the air. "What," he intoned, "Is your favorite sweet, Percy?"  
"Tootsie Pops", intoned the masculine megalith monotonously.  
"Very good," said the candyman. At that point his staff gave up spinning and by the time it landed in his hand it was a tootsie pop, which he passed to the cookie construct. The baked behemoth carefully forced open Mammoth's jaw by degrees, like somebody winding a winch, then crammed the lollipop in. There was a long sucking sound, and the color literally drained out of mammoth as he faded into a dull penumbral sepia tone. Then there was a sound of falling houses and the flash of sunrise colors. He wore the same grim expression, his fists were clenched, but his thick greasy hair had been styled into Shirley Temple curls. His head was covered with a flat sunhat that went out of style during the late 1930's. His clothing had become a curious hybrid of sailor outfit and little-Bo-Peep blouse. In his ham-sized fists was clutched an enormous spiral-patterned lollipop.

The candyman moved over to Jinx in one complete stride without jumping or skipping, although each of the enchanted evildoers was more than seven feet apart. Weird Wally eagerly leaned over to meet the frosted gaze of Jinx. "Yes, yeeeees yes yes YES!"  
He spun around and surprised the onlooking titans by meeting each of them in the eyes at once.  
"THAT!" he exclaimed, pointing with his candycane triumphantly, locking them in his stare while not taking his eyes off the girl, "is a fine young LADY!"  
He spun around 720 degrees. "Ooooh YES! This is something I can WORK WITH! Just look at her."  
He gestured expansively and smiled broadly, like Vanna White revealing a vowel.  
"Physical prowess. Innate supernatural power. Why, if she actually put a little effort into it, she could become a terrific sorceress! If she'd prepared a little more, and read a bit, she might not be in this position. Don't you wish you'd planned ahead and done that, young Miss Luther?"  
Jinx nodded and shuddered  
"Now, Toby Luther," he said, with the softness of earnest concern in his eyes, "What desert would you like most?"  
"Ice cream," she squeaked.  
"What kind of ice cream?" he asked, urging her on.  
"Neopolitan."  
He snapped his fingers. "An excellent choice!"  
Before him was a small trough of ice cream, with roughly a cubic foot of each lightest coolest Vanilla, tangiest, sweetest Strawberry, and darkest, richest Chocolate. He handed Jinx a silver spoon.  
"Eat up dear."  
And she did. She was slow at first, but a little pinkish flicker darted across the opaque surface of her cornea, and she began to speed up. The spoon dug deeper gouges in the frozen mass, and more of the melted syrup spread across her mouth. The motion blur made it hard to tell, but Beast Boy was pretty sure she was eating with her bare hands. Time lengthened and compacted, and she was lying back, sitting placidly in front of an empty trough. Her face was decorated in the white-brown-and-pink war-paint of her culinary conquest. Her stomach was swollen to a nearly shapeless sloshing two-foot-wide mass, gurgling and shifting as the still-frigid chunks melted in body heat. Her sticky hands rested gently on her heaving gut. Although she showed no discomfort, Beast Boy's stomach throbbed and head ached in physical empathy for the indigestion, bloating, and brain-freeze she must be going through.

Weird Wally turned around to face her, the titan's gone from his attention. "You…yes, you have The Requisite. You have The Stuff. You could be…dare I say, a future candidate? A successor, a protégé, a woman after my own heart, one to which I could pass on my…craft."  
Weird Wally grinned a wide, horrible smile that would melt lead.  
"I know you're in there somewhere, and I want you to understand that this is just a temporary precaution. After you've had a little time to get used to the idea and on-the-job training, I think I could ease off the enchantment and give you free rein to follow in my very large footsteps. Would you like that?"  
Jinx's head seemed about to incline, but her lip quivered. She turned it degree by degree, like somebody carefully trying to ease a jutting bone shard back into their body, and back the other direction, to amount a small shake of her head. The effort caused her nose to bleed.  
"I didn't think so. Don't worry though, there will be plenty of time to make up your mind."  
Weird Wally produced a chain of hankerchiefs, each with a different candy stapled to it, and rubbed off the trickle of blood.  
"Now then, you really must clean yourself up."  
Jinx managed to lick all the ice-cream off her hands and face in two seconds, without ever moving any part of her body other than her tongue. Even Wally had to blink at that.  
"And full of surprises I see! I like that! You've got spirit."  
His face underwent a change, sinking from parental pride through some subtly _Other_ emotion indecipherable to human minds, to a business-like mask.  
"There is the more combat-oriented adjustment. Now, the bad luck rays are nice, but I think I'll have to tweak them into a general negative causality radius-aura. I'll give you an added theme-power of course, and some minions to assist you."  
He tapped her lightly on the nose, and her stomach gurgled and shrunk with the sounds of rapid digestion. The transformation happened when her belly had returned to its normal twelve-centimeter circumference. It was bound up in a smart-looking purple and black tuxedo, and between her hair was wedged a brown-white-and-pink striped top-hat. She rose to her feet, twirled a violet cane topped with an orb of cream-white, blood-and-water pink, and loam brown. Then she winked, somersaulted backwards, and bowed.  
Weird Wally folded his fingers and leaned back against thin air.  
"Excellent."


	7. Chapter 7

**I**

The chocolate statue of Terra sailed through the air. It drifted back and forth on air currents, propelled by the inertia of the cyclopean appendage that had flung it. On its way it grazed building sides and fell from rooftop to rooftop, slowing its decent and trajectory. It ricocheted off of buttresses and lampposts, battered, cracked, and then landed to break against hard cold pavement.

**II**

Starfire watched the buildings flit by with an expression of mildly concussed good humor. The spinal trauma had temporarily damaged her primary consciousness, and the sputtering mind-mote just forgot about things like pain and fear as it watched the pretty colors.

Then it faded back as another waking mind was buoyed up by its urgent demands, such as "friends in danger", "hurtling through the air without control", and "disorienting spinal trauma".

Starfire blinked very, very, slowly. Each tiny facet in her compound irises went out, then glowed bright before subsiding. Her mouth turned slowly from a vacant grin to a grimace of alarm and a wide gaping hole of dismay.

The joy of flight was easy enough to maintain once you got it. You just held it tight, and dropped your consciousness down out of the main focus, and that facet would take over it while your dominant consciousness dealt with more pressing matters, such as the building looming up before you, or a big green thing with teeth. However, when you were actually dealing with such a situation primarily, it was hard to conjure up some glorious, carefree thought from your childhood, as your nerve-stem tended to be full of things like "This is going to hurt".

"Son of a vondrook!" she shouted, and attempted to stir up the joy of flight just before she smacked against a wall.

Starfire hurt too much to swear. She slid down slowly, depositing her top layer of skin on the neon-pink painted concrete wall in exchange for life-saving reduction of inertia. That really stung, but as long as she could still feel the pain, she knew she wasn't going to be in serious danger.

_Frell that, I want to stop hurting!_, she thought.

She felt a patch of something odd. A patch on her forhead had gone all fuzzy and vacuous, and the sensation going through it was not so much painful as odd, a buzzy feeling, like the kind you get when you press your teeth against vibrating glass, or sit on a complicated auto-massage pad. Another facet of her awareness popped in with an intra-psychic message, letting the current dominant mind know that this meant her exterior flesh had been partially sheered away, and this sensation was concrete grating against her dark green exoskeleton. What was more, she was also getting patches of bare exoskeleton on her hands and one thigh.

"FRELLING VONDROOK!" she shrieked, lips cut and jagged by their erratic contract with the concrete.

She felt every inch of her body against the unyielding surface, and every inch touching it hurt. What was more, thanks to the recent events, she had many more inches to scrape. She could feel her stomach thighs lagging a few painful inches behind the legs they were connected to, her stomach riding up to slap and push against her breasts like an ocean tide, her two chest-protrusions growing a criss-cross wound as they flapped against the hard manufactured rock, an experience that a human female would have been unable to bear without the relief of unconsciousness.(20)

Just when she imagined most of her face must be sheered off, she mercifully slid into a soft, fabric/tarp overhang. Her decent was halted, and she breathed deep relief.

Just then she heard a soft tearing sound. She remembered that, while such structures would have supported her narrow body a few days ago, she had undergone a rapid and very relevant increase in –  
Rip!

*SLAM*

Starfire considered taking a breath, now that she was actually on the ground, but decided against it. It hurt too much. She would breathe later.

A voice drifted towards her, sent by the high God of Idiotic Questions.

"Are you okay?

(20)Tameranians are not mammals. They have no nipples or navals, and the breasts are far less sensitive because they serve little purpose other than to store nutrients and jiggle in an intriguing manner.

**III**

The broken chocolate statue of Terra shifted a little. From one of the shattered chocolate arms, a flab-ringed limb stretched. At the cracked and halved head, there was a licking and crunching sound. The hand groped around and broke off a slate of chocolate and stuffed it into the shadowed gap, Bit by bit, with increasing vigor, the chocolate carapace vanished into the revealed figure of a human girl. Her legs and arms splayed out in improbable but comfortable positions. Her black t-shirt rode up to fully expose her round perfect pot-belly, and the teen titan logo curved between her orange-sized breasts. Her face was plastered with chocolate and a broad relaxed grin. Then a tongue shot out in a flicker of pink and her visage was clean. Her midsection gave a small gurgle, and she shot up, awake and alert.

She surveyed the scene around her. This place was, or had been, Jump City North Park. It was modified in a different manner than the rest of the city. The color scheme was unaltered aside from a few odd peppermint-stick lamp-posts. There was something different though. The grass smelled different, rich and dark, yet somehow artificial. The trees looked vaguely…off. There was also a large carnival where the playground had been.

It was…like a playground, but…big. The log ride looked suspiciously like the alligator-slide from the playground. A ride called "The Undulator" seemed suspiciously similar to the see-saw in shape and color scheme. That ring-toss game, seemed to be built inside the stone elephant. It was crowded out by flashing lights and unpleasant but vaguely familiar music, but she could make out the general shape of the monkey bars and…

And all this time, she had been walking towards it. She hadn't even noticed as her feet tottled along to keep up with her eyes. She was already deep in among the otherwise empty amusements, and even as she turned around she realized that she was lost.

She was disoriented and confused. That was the point. Every element of the carnival was designed to make the senses sizzle and fry. Mind-obliterating music pulsated through the air, radioactive bass notes pounding the ear like a drum at a metallica concert. There was violently offensive but still sub-mediocre quality metal and punk pulsating through the air, and tuneless angry shouting of the genre that people expected Cyborg to listen to(21). Bright lights flashed, advertising such rides as "Wild Mouse" and "The Expunger" in faulty neon. A disoriented mixture of sugary, oily, and smoky aromas mingled into a congealed aroma that was tasted more than smelled, and managed to simultaneously stimulate the appetite and the gag reflex. Layers of smoke from faulty electrical outlets, food stands, and atmospheric dry-ice mingled to limit visibility and overlay the area with a patchwork of artificial haze. Some high-octane pop tune blared out of a speaker with the same audio quality as a drive-through intercom, at once loud and indistinct. At first it sounded like a song Terra knew and liked, but it was just the least bit off. The notes were a little too high here and a little too low there, the singer just somewhat more androgynous, the chorus all screwed up, too much lyrics and not enough instruments, and at the center of it all that simplistic thrumming sub-harmonic which is the staple of experienced but bad guitar players everywhere: **Chord chord chord chord chord chord** _other chord_- **Chord chord chord chord chord chord** _other chord_.

Terra shivered. She couldn't name anything specific about this carnival, just the impressions. That's how they were. Every single attraction was designed to grab your attention for the 3.14 seconds until the next one grabbed it, and the next one, like some group of audio-visual bullies playing keep-away with your conciousness. She normally liked carnivals. The vomit-inducing rides, the vomit-inducing food, the vomit-inducing people, and the general ipecac-quality was part of its tacky charm. Terra was generally attracted to anything with bright lights(22), and throbbing noises only made it cooler. It was that song that bugged her. She couldn't stop herself from listening it. It sounded so…discordant, yet repetitive. It struggled to satisfy some aesthetic need, but always fell short by the time it got to the chorus. It was like some girl in a pit, chained to the ground by some vital organ, struggling up but always getting yanked back before she could complete her Sisyphean task. **Chord chord chord chord chord chord** _other chord_!

Terra shuddered as she moved past a completely empty stand offering fried meat(23) on sticks. It wasn't that it looked abandoned, it was just the reverse. The booth looked as the traveling communicable disease warehouse had merely stepped out five minutes for a quick smoke and a piss. Even with as little imagination as she had, it was too easy to twist the shadows into a crouching figure, just waiting their under the deep-fry machine, ready to spring up and offer some abrupt and hearty greeting with a hand on her shoulder, and-  
Terra sucked in a deep breath to calm herself. It was like drinking a milkshake through a coffee stir in the odor-thickened dry ice haze. She tried to pull down her shirt to fully cover her awkward little pot-belly, and squirmed in her lingerie-tight shorts apprehensively. She didn't mind the abrupt anatomical change at first, but right here and right now, their seemed to be too much exposed flesh for her comfort, too many places for a broken beer bottle to brush across or an ice pick to penetrate.  
**Chord chord chord chord chord chord** _other chord_.

(21)Truth be told, Cyborg was a hardcore Prairie Home Companion devotee, and the only genres of music he really enjoyed were Bluegrass, Disco, and Icelandic throat-singing.  
(22)The titans had to switch to holistic pest-prevention methods ever since she burnt her tongue in the bug zapper  
(23)Meat here defined as "Anything in the animal kingdom, as opposed to fungi, bacteria, plant, or protozoa"

**IV**

Raven drifted through the silent streets, literally. She always preferred hovering to the laborious task of walking, manually putting one foot down, shifting all her weight to it with a contraction of the hip muscles, then drawing the thigh up only to repeat the process. You had to do it a dozen times just to cross a large room. She kept dodging down through the pavement, checking the basements and sewage tunnels and general subterranean area in case something unpleasant was hoping to ambush her. She could never do well with…burrowing things. It was one of the many reason's she hadn't gotten along with Terra(24). She could deal with flying, but you had to feel safe with the earth you were standing on. Something about a thing crawling, creeping silently, and erupting through stone and soil to meet her with teeth or hands or tentacles or simply an unyielding pale mass seeking to grab her down and smother her in-  
Raven road-blocked her train of thought. She calmly drifted back up to the surface and drank in air, in through the nose, out through the mouth. Her inner eye blinked and scanned the surroundings, looking for any surge of power beyond the background magic. There wasn't any nearby forces, but she could feel some ominous concentration, a nebulous brooding on the edge of her senses, like a magnetic north to her metaphysical compass.

A tinkle of broken glass shattered her concentration and her eyes snapped open like those of a battered villain at the end of an action movie. A cadaverous figure darted into an ally at the edge of her peripheral vision. She pursued(25) automatically, a dark swish in the air.

Raven loomed. It was normally difficult to loom when you're 5'4", but Raven managed it. Her shadow reached out at the speed of darkness, spreading across to the edge of narrow sidewalk corridor, then found something and came back. Raven cautiously raised her defenses. She shattered a nearby window with a shock of vibration, and levitated its component shards into a black shiny nova of pain. It lazily orbited her head as she floated down the alley with a sinister coldness that would have made a dementor look like Snuggles the Bear. As Rave approached the shadowed patch between two garbage cans and a discarded sofa, she heard a high-pitched scream, a series of hyperventilating whimpers, and a soft trickling of liquid. She peered over the edge of the sofa.

"Don't hurt me!" squealed the figure, curling into a ball so as to present the smallest possible target. Raven blinked, and was so surprised by the recognition this provoked that the shower of glass fell to the pavement. One wide eye stared back at her and also blinked.

"Oh…it's you," he observed, dumbfounded.

Raven frowned at him, pausing. He was vaguely familiar. She'd seen him running from something, at least once, but there was something else-  
Oh.  
That time.

Pete looked at the iconic image, the supernatural girl who played guardian to the city, and had no doubt saved his life several times before, without intending or knowing it. Even so, there was something about her that seemed more _personally_ familiar, more intimate, more-  
Oh.  
That time.

When Blackfire first came to visit her sister Starfire, one of the events of the high-energy night was a visit to a rave. Raven remarked that this was pointless. Pete appeared by her, observed that everything was, in fact, pointless, and then contradicted his remark by inquiring if Raven wanted to talk about it. The two of them then drifted off(26) to a quiet corner to engage in private conversation.

Pete was, by and large, a boy of limited self-esteem, and the prospect of talking to a preternatural superhero is rather intimidating. It didn't help that Raven responded to pretty much everything with minimal noises of acknowledgement or short, dry remarks, and displayed a general look of apathy. What people who knew Raven better would have been able to tell him was that the demon-dame's response to pretty much everything was minimal noises of acknowledgement or short, dry remarks, accompanied by a general look of apathy. A close inspection with the aid of a high-quality magnifying glass would show the beginnings of an upward cure at the corners of her mouth. The conversation lagged, and neither Raven nor Pete got any that night(27).

Now fate had thrown Pete and Raven together again. The awkward past encounter hovered over them, impossible to miss and impossible to bring up, like a fart in an elevator. There was a longish pause, and then the goth boy gathered the nerves to speak.

"What happened here?" Pete asked, rubbing away some streaked mascara. "I was doing some painting up at the lighthouse, and there was this big amber light. There was a lot of crashing noise outside, and I just waited until whatever it was blew over." He blushed a chalky fuchsia, whatever shreds of machismo and pride he had wilting in the wake of his past cowardice.

"There was a big wave of caramel, and something supernatural happened," Raven said blankly.

"And?" Pete inquired, with a bit of disbelieving whine in his voice.

"That's all I know," Raven said curtly.

She turned around and started floating out of the alley. Pete looked around, extended an arm, let it drop, and gave a hesitant sigh.  
"Wait…er, I mean…can I come with you?"

Raven turned around and stared at him blankly. "Nobody's stopping you."

Pete took a few deep breaths, inwardly recriminated himself for being an embarrassing idiot, and tottered helplessly after her like a baby duckling.

(24)Number 27, right before "always leaves a hair plugs and ring in bathtub" and after "Toasted Cheese Incident".  
(25)Like Terriers and Policemen, superheroes instinctively chase anything that flees.  
(26)Literally in Raven's case.  
(27)Due to the nature of the male ego, Pete mentally edited the encounter, and he strongly suggested through tactless innuendo to his friends that him and Raven had done something creative involving rubber, whipped cream, and goat's blood.


	8. Chapter 8

**I**

Starfire opened her eyes, and the twelve thousand individual angles that her compound-eyes saw resolved into a slightly blurry image of a slender, blond girl extending a helping hand. Starfire took it gratefully. She winced and ground her mandibles against the pain as the good Samaritan helped her to her feet. Her exoskeleton had cracked in a few places, and the entire front half of her was a sticky mattress of agony.

Starfire moaned slightly as she rubbed the tender orange flesh criss-crossed with yellow webbings of protective mucus. Although I have at times felt better, I believe I do not require any immediate medical attention," she said. "Thank you most heartily kind stranger"

"No problem," the girl replied. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere? You look kinda familiar,"

The blond frowned pensively, putting her hand on her baggy camouflage trousers.  
Starfire thought for a moment.

"Yes…I believe we encountered one another at the building of taking videos out, watching them, losing them somewhere for a few weeks and paying of exorbitant late fees for. The Control Freak attacked with much mayhem, and you were so kind as to offer us a complementary rental."  
"Oh yeeeah, you're Starfire right? My name's Ryan Edison."

Ryan's memory scrolled back through her internal rolodex and drew up the image of the green-eyed, slender, purple-skirted orange-on-orange airborne girl. She attempted to match this recollection up with the apparition facing her: a bloated she-wolf coated in sulphurus webbing and brick dust, a thick broad stomach straining against what once may have been a miniskirt and vaguely vestigial chest-fest straining against a bra-like shred of such staggering fragility that the only thing holding it on appeared was the copious amount of sticky green blood, a body surface that appeared to have had a skin treatment with a sanding belt, the whole body engaged in a constant jerking, twitching movement that was distinctly insectoid.

"So…um, you look…different," she said, sweatdropping and rubbing her head. Then, because it had to be said, for the sake of the elaborate chess-game and politicking that is the core of human courtesy and conversational discourse,  
"New haircut?"

**II**

Terra decided she didn't like this carnival for two reasons.

The first was that there weren't any other people. The crowds were half the fun. All those people, mingling, enjoying, filling the air with idle talk, intense passion, casual recreations. They charged her up with the vicarious pleasure and human energy. They made her feel alive.

The other reason she didn't like this place was that it reminded her of hell. When most people say that something reminds them of hell, they mean that it brings to mind hell, or fits with their preconceived notions about hell. In Terra's case this was more literal. The blond superhero had, as a result of her impulsive self-sacrifice, been turned to stone, and since a stone heart can't pump blood and stone nervous systems do not conduct electricity, had promptly died. Her final act of self-sacrifice had been insufficient to outweigh the her betrayal and attempted murder of the few people who showed her kindness, she was personally delivered to one of the lower circles of hell. There was a brief trial, but when Slade had called Frederick Nietzsche to the witness stand and admitted that, of good and evil, she had only managed to get beyond the former, there was little hope.

One of the perks that came with ascending (descending?) to the rank of Demon Princess was that she had been permitted to visit other layers of hell, and the circle directly below had inspired the comparison to her present position.

At first, the place had seemed nice. There was some fire, but very little brimstone. Physical bodies were permitted, and they were more good-looking and comfortable than the standard-issue simulcrums made of dried blood, powdered bones, and prostitute tears. The place seemed...fun. All around was the fanfare of the carnival, the loud noises, the flashing lights. Aside from a few stylish horns and fangs, the demons in charge resembled reasonably attractive mortals in expensive but revealing clothing. There were rides to ride and games to play. What's more, all the games seemed to offer the one prize that every damned soul craves most of all: Freedom.

Some of them were obviously impossible, like throwing a tennis ball into a wine bottle, but people generally flocked to them after trying the other ones. There was a whack-a-mortal game, using actual trapped souls as was the hellish standard, but they just seemed to stop coming up before you won enough points for a resurrection. The skee-ball game, one of the operators informed her (as one of the lords of the circles she was entitled to inside information), had just one sixth-dimensional string missing in the third electron of each black paint molecule. The result of this was that the balls treated anything above the 10 point hole as a separate universe. The shotgun at the shooting gallery fired blanks, and the test-your-strength device didn't have a bell at the top. There was a recently opened section that had games that were easier to win, in fact games you always won, but these had no prizes, and were created in accordance with the "fulfill some of the expectations set by episodes of The Twilight Zone" act.

The rides were worse. The moment you reached the end of the seven-light-year lines, there was a 3 in 772 chance that you wouldn't be allowed to go on account of being to tall, too short, etc. If you actually got in, the extremely uncomfortable buckles and safety bars would clamp down, and the machine would ascend about two inches before there was a loud pop and a cloud of smoke, and the engineer would announce that the ride had to be closed for repairs. Once in every google of attempts, the ride would actually proceed normally, and this would cause the greatest shock of despair that can be felt by the human soul, because there is no way that any amusement ride can live up to the hopes created by several geological epochs of anticipation.

There was something of that circle of hell in every carnival, it was true, but this one just seemed to have more of it. She would actually be comforted to see one of those sexy, charming, utterly sadistic demon-vendors advertising their psychological trap in a booth instead of the still-warm vacancy, the air-colored, nothing-shaped suggestion of a true carnie, waiting, whispering, promising to become real.  
**Chord chord chord chord chord chord** _other chord_!


	9. Chapter 9

**I**

Pete stared at Raven as she floated along the street, emotionless and alert like some futuristic robot sentinel. He hadn't been able to get a good look at in the alley, with the light at her back and the rippling cloak and field of psychic energy, but there was definitely something different about her. He couldn't tell from this angle, with her back to him and the cape billowing in the wind. Then she turned a corner, the slight breeze through the intersection and the movement whipping her mantle out straight backwards and revealing a full side profile.

Her gut overhung her belt enough to completely conceal the front of it. It rested slightly against two thighs like ostrich drumsticks.

_DAYUMN!_ he thought, his eyes bulging. _You're F***in' huge! Who did you eat?!_

"An eyeliner-wearing prat who made comments about my weight," Raven said dryly.

"Did you just read my mind?!"

"Not exactly. I don't read people's minds without their permissions, but I'm telepathically receptive. Just don't think so loudly at me,"

"Oh, right. I'm, I'm sorry about that," Pete said.

"Don't worry about it," she said in a flat voice.

"I mean I'm really, really sorry. I was just sort of surprised, it seemed like kind of a sudden change since the last time I'd met you."

"Forget it," Raven replied tonelessly.

Pete breathed in and sighed. That was the problem with talking to Raven. It was like that time he spent performing children's theater at a Catholic school. The entire audience had been as still and silent as a mausoleum. It was row upon row of little children who had been trained to keep quiet and sit still by a group of women with no outlet for sexual frustration whatsoever and a minimum of pleasure whose basic form of communication was to wrap them across the knuckles with twelve inches of steel-backed ruler. He'd kept doing the acting bigger and more exaggerated, trying to fill the listening void of non-response, not properly understanding that these children had been trained not to laugh or shout or react in any way. He'd just found himself in a tailspin of over-acting because he didn't get any feedback to gauge his response.  
It was like that with Raven. The cowled face focused straight ahead, the cloak's folds concealed any shivering or unconscious tics, and no trickle of personal information or emotion leaked out of that cold deadpan voice and knowing, remote eyes.

Raven was…worried would be the wrong word, maybe preoccupied. It was more like a train of thought than an emotion, but it kept to an evocative, nonverbal railway. This general theme was "something is wrong." Trailing after the engine of perceived incongruity there were several passenger cars of internal debate and boxcars of contemplation.  
For example, why was she fat? She'd eaten a lot, but she'd just woke up the next morning with an empty stomach and a full everything else. Why? Normally people don't get a major craving, clean out the fridge, and bloat up overnight. Of course, granted, she was not normal, and by some definitions not properly a "person", but it had happened to Starfire and Terra too. It had probably been done by magic, but that wasn't any answer. That was the "It's magic silly" answer. Magic means more complications, not less. Which spell did it, and how can it be countered, broken, or reversed, if at all? Is it a spell at all, or a more nebulous, supernatural power? Is it wizardry or sorcery, or an arcane talent, or could it be divine power granted by a spirit or demigod? Magic isn't simple, or easy, or direct. Magic is not alchemy, a button you push, or a supreme science. In science, you have to follow all the rules and do everything precisely right, otherwise you don't get any results. When you do magic, you have to follow all the rituals, say the right words, prepare the appropriate reagents, and it still might just turn on you out of spite. Magic is not predictable, precise, or systematic. If you know a spell that makes diamonds fall out of your mouth, you can't just pop them out all day until you're rich and De Beer's is bankrupt by market flooding(28). You'd turn into a diamond statue or you'd start shitting coal or something similarly unpleasant, not because you forgot that "Niktu" comes after "Klatu Verata", but because magic hates being taken for granted(29). Was it a side effect of a surrealist enchantment? Was it some curse baked into the cookie warriors? Was it delivered by a tiny flying sheep who shoved quantum-distortion-generating emeralds up their asses while they slept? She had no idea.

Where were the others? That was another question. She had overshot and hurdled out of the area. Had won? Had they been defeated, killed, or somehow transformed by some uncanny alchemy into sugar-coated simulacrums of their former selves, or chocolate frosted undead horrors? Had they slain or destroyed their adversary? Were they still fighting now?

There were also her other friends. She could feel that they were still alive and conscious. It was more than a hunch, but less than a full-fledged vision. Just a rough, stubborn feeling of sureness connected with Beast Boy, Robin, and Cyborg's respective mental textures, a crude alloy of innate quasi-magic and hind-brain psionics. But where were they? Where captured and being tormented by a malevolent marzipan mixer? Where they holed up in a shopping mall somewhere, surrounded by sugar-glazed zombies? If they were in trouble, how would she reach them? If she was in trouble, how would they reach her? She had felt something, three looming trails of power around her somewhere. She couldn't make out the precise nature, whether it was cold or warm, transmutation, conjuration, or animation, or just something with its own source of magic.

Then there was this guy, someone she had an awkward conversation with near a rave. He was kinda cute, or she'd find him cute if she took the time to think about it(30) Right now, he was dead weight. He didn't have any special power or skills, and he was vulnerable, so she would have to protect him. She just hoped(31) he would stop bothering her and intruding into her thoughts. She wasn't arrogant, or exactly afraid of social contact. She just didn't like to draw out of her internal affairs so much to enact ritualistic exchanges of pleasantries. Small talk was just social air. She generally didn't want to receive any information less vital "You've won the lottery" or "the building is on fire" or "a worker at the Godiva chocolate factory is trapped under a landslide of assorted dark chocolates, peppermint bark, and crème caramels, and we need somebody to eat him to freedom!"

The nagging suspicion that she was being watched continued to persist, but she chalked it down to the gothish fellow tagging along behind her. She had a vague idea that he was looking at her behind. Raven didn't feel like turning around to check, partly because she didn't want to know if he was, a little bit because she might be disappointed by which expression she would find on his fascinated face, but mostly because one of the three strong presences had begun to get closer to her on a wide orbit, and something about it made her feel…unpleasant.

Raven's rippling cloak, her stony expression and wide but firm curving buttock like an ancient Venus statuette, Pete's unsteady legs and desperately focused gaze, where all captured in the reflective sheen of something sticky and blue. This little glob solidified into a thin film as perfect and detailed as a monochrome photograph, then retracted into the dark chocolate sphere which drifted onward with a faint humming sound.

(28)Good riddance to the extortionist, worker-abusing bastards  
(29)it also likes irony and has a twisted sense of humor.  
(30)deep in the iron cages of her subconscious libido, her id plotted things with him involving goat blood as lubricant  
(31)An experienced sorcerer never wishes anything unless they really mean it.

**II**

Starfire reached up and felt her long, full, tangerine tresses.  
"No. Although I sustained many minor injuries recently my hair is intact and unharmed."  
Ryan tried to keep bemused humor out of her voice.  
"That's fortunate."  
"Indeed," Starfire agreed solemnly. "In speaking of things that are fortunate, how did you escape the all-encompassing wave of caramel that has left this fine city lifeless and disturbingly altered?"

"Oh, that," Ryan said. "Well, that was just dumb luck. After the experience with Control Freak, I decide to switch to a job with a little less human interaction. I still like to watch movies on the job and still get paid, even though the hours are crap, so I decided to get work running films in the Jump City Royal Theater projection room."  
Ryan inhaled through her nose, and breathed out through her mouth.  
"I was working on my seventh week there. The movie was House on Haunted Hill. The theater always shows a late night double-feature of some old classics or unsung independent films, and it's a relief for me as well after 14 hours of Mission Impossible VI."  
She breathed again, and gnawed pensively at her fingernails.  
"At first, I…er…like… I didn't notice. I didn't notice anything was happening because it was in one of the parts with all the screams. It jiggled, jiggled, jiggled. There was some stuff coming in. It didn't really…really catch my at-ten-ten-tention until I saw Vincent Price's black and white face obscured by something rippling and amber-colored. People were running for the exits, but it was surging in through them. People climbed up, trying to get higher, to get away, but I could tell the …the-the-the-the-the WHATEVER it was was going to reach the top seats. A big wave of it smashed smashed the nosebleed seats and I knew it was going to bury everyone and there wasn't anything we could do about it. As soon as I realized that I just went deaf and blind, I mean, I could see and here, but it was just light and sound, didn't mean anything. All I remember are smells. Popcorn. Sweat, Panick. My own pee. That smell. The big, hot, burning-sugar smell. It was so sweet and rich and brown I wanted to puke."  
Ryan's whole body was shivering. No, not shivering. That was too random, too mild. This was a sustained, full-body vibration. Sweat turned to steam in the air as soon as it dribbled out of her pores.  
"I waited until film whipped me as it ran out. I looked down, and all the brown stuff had hardened. It was less than a foot below me. I tried not to look at it, but I could see, almost, through the dark bits. There were, there were PEOPLE in there, frozen, like they were alive."  
Ryan's fists where clenching and unclenching. Her knees slowly folded up and pulled together.  
"I climbed, I c-c-c-climbed, climbed, climbed, climbed, climbed over it. It was frozen their, all hard and solid, like a solid sea, and I thought time might have stopped. I just-just-just tried to get out. The door was lost under the…the stuff, but there was an upper window. The-the-the-the-the-the-the s-s-s-stuff had piled up along the side, and I just slid down to the street. I've been wandering around, looking for somebody, anybody else, and now I've found you."

Starfire stared at Ryan for a moment, head cocked, as if trying to decide if she was some new kind of walking gingerbread cookie. Then she burst into tears, leapt forward, and smothered Ms. Edison with a kidney-rupturing hug.

"Oh you poor adolescent female! You are obviously in an undue amount of stress from this most horrific and traumatizing of unfortunate situations! This must take a great goal upon your inflexible three-portioned human psyche. Do not worry, for we are here together, and at least know that there is a companion in this cruel distortion of our beloved city otherwise empty of positive life, except for my dear friends Raven and Terra and I hope-"

"Hhh-hk", said Ryan, because under the current pressure around her abdomen, her lungs had been forced somewhere into her upper naval cavity and she was turning a shade of blue that would make Violet Beauregard look pink by comparison.

As is often the case, Starfire released her unintentional victim as soon as she released her error. The death-grip-tamaranian-corset-hug had accomplished the work of breathing into a paper bag for several minutes and a few months of counseling in a matter of seconds. Already the maiden Edison felt her head clear as her lungs reinflated and her sternum bones began to knit.

"Thanks, I needed that. So, I suppose now you're going to ask about my name," Ryan said with the resigned air of somebody completing a dull but important ritual.

"No, I had no such intention," Starfire said earnestly.

"Well now you're going to ask anyway. Go ahead. Ask," Ryan said with a look of grim assurance.

"What about your name?" Starfire said with good-natured perplexity.

"I **knew** you'd ask!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot and shaking her hair in a manner that indicated desire to reach out for the stars and throttle the heavens.

"My parents met at a party Jonathan Demme threw to pat himself on the back for his work on 'Stop Making Sense'. My mother was feeling out a prospective actor for her latest project, 'Lemonade Dignity', and waiting for the band to arrive. She gravitated over to a water fountain and met my dad. She mistook him for a writer (he had actually come in to fix a leaking pipe), and they really hit it off while the crappy DJ was playing 'A Boy Named Sue'. From that day on, they chose that as their song. They decided if they ever had a boy, they'd name him Sue, as a little in-joke.  
When my mom found she was pregnant, she got a sonogram to check the sex. It only had a six percent error margin, so they were pretty sure I'd be a boy. When she finally delivered ten months later, and when they found out I was a girl, my dad insisted that I have a boy's name, so I got named after uncle Ryan."  
She finished her monologue, wiping trails of spittle from her mouth that tended to emerge whenever she spoke oft-rehearsed rhetoric.  
"So, why are you named Star-"  
She was cut short with a hard, cracking thwack as a candy cane came out of a side ally and struck her head.

**III**

Raven closed her eyes and covered her ears, trying to focus on her second sight. There was something out there, something she couldn't pin down. The aura had overtones of light, and something vibrant and wholesome, but somehow when she put the elements all together it felt wrong and abominable. Even trying to nail down its location to a general direction like east or south made her forehead go numb with the nullifying backlash. She had almost narrowed in on it when her concentration was shattered by a sharp, hard, yank on her robe. Her focus lost in surprise and a small bit of pain, she wobbled in the air before crashing to the ground. Happily for her, she landed on something relatively soft. As it turned out, Pete was the object that marginally cushioned her fall. Being pinned to the ground by an enigmatic superheroine brought forth a mixture of pleasure and pain, but with his chest unable to rise enough to circulate air through his lungs, pain was definitely the primary emotion.

"Why did you do that?" Raven snapped. She annunciated each word strongly and sharply, as if speaking to somebody who was being deliberately dense for the express purpose of ticking her off.  
"I need **peace** and freedom from **distractions** so I can **concentrate** on some unknown magical entity that could be bearing down on us this_very_moment. **What** could be so _important_ that you have to **yank** me out of the air?"

Pete looked up and pointed at the great white thing. It was definitely magical, and although it was no longer entirely unknown, it was still bearing down on them at this very moment.

**IV**

Terra gritted her teeth and gave a stammering eruption of sound that was somewhere between a nervous laughter and dry heaves. She was wound up tight, and she had never been good at handling stress and controlling her impulses in the best of situations. At this rate she'd break down and bash her brains out against a wall before she got past the cotton candy stand.

She closed her eyes, stuck her fingers in her ears, made a 180 degree turn, and walked seven paces. Then she turned right, took two short skips, and opened her eyes to the sight her meticulous internal carnival map told her would be there. It was the gaming arcade, a complex mixture of video games, coin-operated games of skill, and slot machines. She squeezed her hand with difficulty into the pocket of stickily-tight shorts, maneuvered her fingers in the near-two-dimensional space enough to take hold of a few quarters, laboriously squeezed them out, and plunged the body-temperature coins into the stylized whack-a-mole machine.

**V**

Ryan screamed an inarticulate cry of pain and protest as she reeled back from the cranial blow. Starfire gave as shriek of surprise as a tall gingerbread figure slid the rest of the way out through a three-inch gap between two glitter-encrusted Starbucks. White pearls of frosting gazed out from its face and induced a horror opposite but equal to the fear invoked by the dripping sockets of a zombie. Unseemly tongues of baked matter raised the bloodied candy cane. They were too dexterous and functional for such a clumsy representation of arms. A row of green frosting drops lined down the front, each affixing a peppermint candy, like a surgical scar. The stylized upward curve of red frosting on the lower half of it's "head" failed to convey any hint of humor or whimsy.  
Each fine detail of the shape was force-fed into Starfire's uniform nerve chord through dozens of tiny pupil-facets. Her separate nodes of consciousness stampeded up and down her back in a rush to get away from them.

Ryan whimpered and put her hand to her head, and was mildly surprised to discover how much blood there was there. From the sense of pressure she could visualize it spurting out in a vaguely comic manner, like the bleeding wall in Evil Dead II. Fragments of thought and sensation hung trapped in her disjointed consciousness like improbable foodstuffs in an Iowan jello mould. Her vision narrowed, surrounded by a tunnel of fuzzy whiteness, and she wondered casually if she was going to die. Then an appropriately placed spurt of adrenaline shattered her concussed complacency with a raw proto-emotion more basic than fear or rage. She raised her arms, ready to-

SMACK. The end of the candy cane rammed into her upper stomach, compressing the solar plexus, stinging the skin, and shifting the partially-healed wishbone into an unnatural arrangement. "F'ck sh't" she breathed out in a scream softer than a whisper. She actually managed to force the expletives from her lungs without the strength to form vowels. She staggered back, curling into the ground by degrees as her knees gave out and her pained abdomen contracted. The gingersnap shadow loomed towards her and

SNAPPED back as its head was bitten off. It swung defensively, but the attack had put it off balance, and with less than a square inch of foot surface a lack of stability was something it couldn't afford. It keeled backwards and shattered.

Starfire roared like an enraged emu and hissed like a Madagascar cockroach. She masticated cookie chunks and shattered candy cane, savoring the sweet spiced taste of victory, oblivious to the figure looming behind her with a lethal peppermint stick raised to beat her head into her kidneys.  
She didn't notice it, but that didn't matter. Ryan leapt up with an adrenal burst of strength and a flying kick shattered the second baked abomination. Caught up in a swell of savage emotion, she bent on all fours to scrape the tasty remnants off the floor with rasping tongue and undulating jaws. She was halfway finished when she remembered her manners and species, and got up a little sheepishly to wipe her mouth with her shirtsleeve.

Starfire paused from her own hunched and beetle-like feeding to give Ryan a reassuring smile.

Ryan wasn't really sure how to respond, and a particular sense of communal embarrassment swept through her body like a venereal disease. It was that rare and acute specialized form of awkwardness that tended to occur only in a human being encountering Starfire, where whatever glands allow them to feel embarrassed are taking on their own and Starfire's load. She wished that something would happen to break the silence.

Fortunately, it did.

**VI**

Terra had to admit, it was the most distinct Whack-a-Mole game she had ever encountered. The targets where varied, a mixture of gingerbread-men, tall purple-suited grinning figures, chocolate shapes, ugly-looking figures in skirts holding lollipops, and something pink and cloud-like that she couldn't identify. The game title "Candyland" had been nearly scraped out, and a paper sign was scotch-taped above it that read "DENVER CROQUET", although the T was water-damaged and somebody had drawn a red line through the first seven letters so the only wholly intact portion read "ROQUE". The hammer looked rather like a croquet mallet, although it was shorter, and the mallet was also designed with a hard side and a soft side. Why such an innovation would be needed for a light bopping implement was something Terra didn't bother to speculate. She had a truckload of stress and nervous tension built up from the travel here, and she liked this game. She turned the mallet so the soft rubber side faced down and with it gingerly pressed the "START"

It was easy at first. The hammer had a nice swing to it, and the targets where relatively slow-moving. She kept the softer side down for fear that the hard stone half might damage the machine. Each type of target earned the same 15 points, but for some reason she enjoyed hitting the purple-suited men most. As the game sped up, she began to involve herself, turning her eyes to the array of holes instead of letting her whacking reflexes take over. She began to shake a little when she really got into the rhythm of it, her chubby body shuddering with the vibration of rapid impacts. She missed one of the gingerbread men and the mallet hit a patch of bare metal. The rubber returned the energy of the swing twofold, cold stone striking against Terra's forhead with a soft wet thuck. She staggered, and gave a reflexive cry of surprise, but as soon as the two spinning game machines had resolved into one she spun the mallet hard side down to prevent another mishap and got back to whacking. She couldn't afford to waste precious seconds crying when this cascade of targets hopped jauntily in front of her, and she was so hyped up on adrenaline she didn't even notice the pain.

The little figures bobbed faster and faster, but Terra went on her mechanical genocide without missing a single hit. The hard side of the mallet seemed to work better, forcing the targets down with less follow-true and leaving more precious instants to strike another rising opportunity. The purple ones and gingerbread men where popping up less and less, and soon there was a lull in the opposition that had Terra panting in anxiety, afraid the glorious game was over. Her awareness was slowly running down her arms and into the rest of her. She became cognizant of the sticky, tickling trickle of blood down her head, the churning nausea caused by the overexertion, the throbbing numbness in arm muscles that were past protesting and committing acts of terrorism against her nervous system in full-scale rebellion. Then something moved on the game machine and she was off again before the universe would catch up.

Terra hammered down the metal figurine with all the shocking brutality of a Canadian clubber. The air sang a ballad of slaughter as the wooden mallet whistled up and down, up and down. She hammered down a painted miniature with a red vest, green cape, spikey black hair, and a little black eye mask. The current score and high score on the device shot up by 30 points. She eagerly slammed the next two that came up, more of the same, even passing up the purple ones to slam the boy wonders. Another figure flashed, all silver and blue, except for a crude brown smiley-face adorned with a red light-up eye. She finished up two caped crusaders and a gingerbread man that were halfway to their apex before her pendulum of death came over to reach it, and to her horror it clanged against bare steel as the toy man descended out of sight, red eye flashing mockingly. To make up for it, she altered the metal-men shapes to her top priority, and was rewarded with her next blow by 45 points. She took out two cyborg shapes and an eye-masked opponent with one complicated maneuver, the hammer rattling around like a rabid pinball, and bludgeoned a new target on the backswing. She only got a faint glimpse of green before the hammer went down.

A spiral of lights flashed and bells rang. The words "BONUS ROUND" flickered before her, but such was her frenzy that she was not sure whether they were a series of cleverly arranged light-up panels on the game or a signal of fire etched in the air. A complex series of little green animals challenge her hand-eye coordination; there was a savagely realistic green tiger, an anime-esque cutesy octopus, a stylized bat, an elephant that could have been Babar's gangrene-afflicted cousin, a pig and chicken that might have a future role in Sam I Am's diner, and some snarling verdant lycanthrope. She swung with manic frenzy. Her pant legs tore with stress; potbelly shook so violently it became a fleshy blur; shoulders throbbed an angry red with abuse; Terra's shirt was unleashing super-soaker currents of nearly-horizontal sweat which burst into clouds of steam before it struck the ground; her hair fluttered and snapped like honeyed electricity; her eyes were black, bulging pupils, centering beams of intensity on the array of targets before her, sweat, blood, and tears running down the bridge of her nose and her cheeks to unite with foaming spittle in a ghastly pink agony of bodily humors; the friction was so intense that the seat of her pants was starting to smoke.  
Through all of this Terra still strove on, hammering like a madwoman, hammering with a single-minded power that would put ax-murderers to shame and make construction vehicles look like lazy weaklings. If she had been striking a living person they would by now be converted into an inch-thick layer of floor coating. A cluster of nines had formed at the far-left portion of the "high score", mirrored on the "current score", and it was beginning to march to the right extreme of the display. One final target shot up with time-warping slowness.  
Terra's brain had no part in this action, it had become a barely conscious passive observer as a direct eye-to-arms loop took over, so it was as an observer that Terra perceived something curious about this target. It was a little tin doll really, the kind of repulsively cute thing that gift shops put on narrow stools in the hope that someone will accidently break themIt's black and purple costume ran up the length of its cartoony body, with only the four-fingered hands and the elf-eared oversized head showing their shining green. The big sad eyes stared up at her, the wide poised-to-speak smile gleamed with hesitation, and the little silver heart in its arms flipped open. A horrible, distorted apparition leered out at Terra with the cheek-bleeding grin of destructive glee. It wore a half-mask of caking blood, a beard of pinkish foam, and popping eyes of evil-spirited obsidian. The image shattered as the hammer struck, along with the shocked little figurine. The pieces bounced, a mixture of strings and cogs, and little crossbars and painted tin. The springs went limp and purple, falling into the holes like a rain of entrails; the little gears slid down into the gap from which their whole self had emerged, cold and slippery like livers; the chunks of metal ran scraped down and lost themselves in a narrow grate, trailing a thick red oil that could almost be blood. The screen flashed  
"GAME OVER" in dull red and "WINNER!" in sulphurous yellow.

The mallet would have slipped from Terra's fingers if they hadn't numbed and stiffened and atrophied into a deathgrip around it. Instead it swung to the ground still in her hands, meeting the grass with a dull "thunk" and just slightly rebounding against the soft rubber side. Terra slowly crumpled to the ground, her various body parts calling in the physiological debts run up by this entertainment expenditure. Blood siphoned in through the heart, redirecting itself to more important places than tired muscles. Her skin paled and she slumped forward. Her ankles receded and her knees briefly scratched against the return slot as the bent against the ground. Her aching ass smacked into grass, leaving a small scorch mark where the friction fire was put out, too sore to feel the protruding poke of her ankles. Her back curled forward and her head slid down against the cool metal, leaving a trail of blood. She gently and quietly vomited, not a sputtering cough or projectile blast, but one steady stream of chocolate and bile, like the last mud-choked emission of a failing aqueduct. The game machine pelted her with a hail of prize vouchers, and she gently crumpled over and knew no more.

**VII**  
Raven felt her arms grow limp and her retinas burn as she saw the thing that was bearing down on her. Four powerful hooved legs clacked on the pavement. Out of a smooth ungulate body rose a chiseled muscular torso that Mr. Universe would be jealous of. Each of the seven fingers on the two hands ended in some improbable tool: a surgical blade, a star drill, an ice pick, etc., but all had unfriendly applications. The whole creature was perfectly smooth, but not shiney, and the color of pale cream. The face was the most distressing. Seven eyes of different colors surrounded a narrow wound-like hole of a mouth.

"Hide", Raven said to Pete, and she turned to confront the creature. She fired a few short blasts of shadow-energy to put a dent in it. As the bolts of eldritch power struck the opaline nemesis, they seemed to break against it like waves breaking against a shore, and dissolved into nothing. Raven felt a sharp, hot backlash in her mind, the mental equivalent of the sensation you get when you slap your hands against irregular concrete. She repeated her Mantra of "Azeroth, Metrion, Zynthos" and grabbed hold of a nearby dumpster. As she hurled it at the pearly apparition, she felt her mental grip slacken, the field of reflecting brightness was eating away at her telekinetic energy, and it slowly dropped to plop pathetically halfway to its target.

The equine figure before her clacked its attachments together and lowered its head, as if to say "My turn."


	10. Chapter 10

**I**  
There was no thunderclap. There was no explosion. There was no stirring of dust or flashing lights or swirl of air. All that happened was a sharp buzzing sound and a flash of refracted sunlight, and Starfire's already tender body was slashed and poked by crystalline lances. The thing assaulting her was beyond "less than human", it was alien to the world of things mechanical and biological. It was a sheer, transparent, geometric prism, changing size and angle as it moved like the image in a shaking kaleidoscope. She barely managed to get airborne and pull away from it before the geometrically perfect edges lobbed off a limb or skewered an important organ.

Those of Starfire's mental levels that were not holding on to power-triggering emotions discussed tactics. The enemy seemed to possess aerial speed and maneuverability equal to her own. If she fought it in open combat, it would quickly tire her out and seemed unlikely to be capable of such a biological failing. Her best bet would be to keep at a distance, half-hidden, and quickly pulverize it with some sniper-shots of energy.

After these three seconds of internal debate, Starfire relaxed her power and let herself spiral down towards a dumpster, then swerved into an empty allyway when she had fallen out of view. She had to only hope that the creature relied on a general visual and auditory sense matrix, and didn't seek her with some means that penetrated brick and steel.

The object whined as it whizzed through the urban air. She didn't need it to be very close(32). She hovered just under a polka-dotted plastic awning, eyelids peeled back, every pupil-facet trained for that tell-tale-

FLASH!

Photons stored in tiny cells and coils of extraterrestrial organic chemicals discharged and fired into reverse-gear. Fiber-optic coils converged inside intricate and fragile orbs of organic matter and shot out in two streams of flesh-boiling green light.

The eye-beams shot into the crystalline nemesis, saturating it with emerald glow, and then discharged it in seven different rays back at the source.

_____________________________________________________  
(32)One of the many benefits of having eye-beams as weapons is that if you can see it, you can hit it.

**II** The eggshell-colored apparition crouched down and unleashed a spear of white-hot energy. Raven lurched to avoid the beam, but the bolt still struck her hard in the shoulder.

Raven bit back a scream of pain. All along her body she felt a stinging sensation of temperature too extreme to tell whether it was hot or cold. She felt her powers fade to a mere flicker of dark energy, and noticed in a distant sort of way that left arm was lying on the pavement a few feet away from her.

"This is not my day," she muttered.

Raven opened up a purple and black laptop computer in the landscape of her mind. She entered a search query for "offensive spells". She scrolled through a series of titles: Darkness, Darkness teleport, Entropic Surge, Dark Energy Telekinesis, Deathchill Maelstrom...  
"All darkness energies, and useless. What else do I have?" She thought.  
She amended the search, typing in "not 'darkness' ". The translucent web of neural energy shot out again, small strafes of red light nullifying every ten out of eleven ultraviolet memories.

Grains of blood-red sand fell through a dark hourglass with a definate gothic motif on the screen. A new list popped up, and she browsed the paltry selection.

"Blades of Blood...can't afford to use that with this gushing artery. Spirit Flail would be equally inappropriate. Greenflare is too weak, unless you happen to be fighting a kerosene-soaked-rags monster..."

A sharp clacking sound brought her back to her external reality. The great white nemesis was charging on her, nefarious-looking limbs at the ready.

**III**

"EEEEEEEEEEEE!"

Starfire squealed as she dove headfirst into a dumpster, patting frantically to extinguish the small laser-spawned conflagration in her hairdo. She juggled her consciousness nodes as she pensively chewed on some dirty diapers and dead rats.

_Eye-beams fail_  
_Head-on attack seems to be of minimal effectiveness_  
_Energy reflection could just as easily be used to turn Starbolts against us_  
_This is truly delicious feces and deceased mammal_  
_All previous enemies appear to have had high sugar contents, and been unusually easy to digest, moreso than other earth-based life forms. Recommend oral attack and attempted consumption._  
_Second_  
_Agreed_  
_Maybe_  
_Yes_  
_IT SHALL BE DONE_

Starfire rubbed a little moldy bread on her skin to help the wounds close faster, and then burst from the garbage unit with a vengeance. She flew at the crystalline formation, jaws open impossibly wide, mandibles extended, her four-foot tongue waving around like an enraged eel.

The Tamaranian princess violently masticated the crystalline entity. Shards of the creature dripping with saliva went spraying everywhere like transparent shrapnel. Starfire's tongue crackled with sensation. It was sweet as pure sugar!

Human saliva contains chemical agents that break up glucose molecules, the simplest of sugars. Anyone who has tried to lick cotton candy can see the results immediately. Tamaranian salivary juices are similar in composition to human ones, but much stronger.

For this reason, the caustic efficacy of Starfire's attack was readily apparent. More than a third of the prism structure had been chewed or melted away, and she might have met with success, had it not chosen just the right moment to lurch downward and drive her head through two feet of solid steel.

**IV**

Raven cringed and felt her hairs begin to rise. The waves of brightness concentrated along the front side of the creature's face.

_Come on Raven, you can beat this. You are the spawn of a daemonic deity. In terms of power you're somewhere between prophet and a minor god._  
This was pointed out by a green-cloaked Raven with a confident grin.

_And yet…even full gods could be killed,_ a treacherous voice pointed out. This particular voice came from a simpering figure, a lot like her, but with pimples, wet hair, a stained tuxedo, and a face-curling sneer.

_Yeah, by other gods,_ The green-cloaked confidence snapped back.

_Not always. Poor Odin's going to get eaten alive by a bloody wolf. Heck, Baldur was slain by a silly little plant._

Raven shook her head to clear it a bit, and the two arguing figures were knocked off their feet by the gyrating movement. She was definitely sure that she couldn't survive another energy blast any more than a sugar cube could survive a 24 hour period in Starfire's digestive track. So it was a very good thing that Pete leapt in front of her.

**V**

Terra came to again with a headache. She also had a handaches, kneeaches, a backache, and some hair-aches. The entire surface of her skin seemed to be spotted with scabs and loose as an XXL T-shirt on a five year old girl. When she yawned and scratched herself a layer the size of a playing card fluttered off her face. She was rather glad that there wasn't a nearby reflective surface to see herself in. Right now she felt like she had been rejected from a Wes Craven film on the grounds of being too creepy looking, and her mouth tasted like third-time-up vomit and sour foreshadowing.

Terra wiped her mouth and flicked the crystallized mucus from her eyes while her brain went through the usual "regaining consciousness" checklist. She was still Terra, blond female, just short of five foot ten, no visible legions, scars, or surplus appendages. Extra body mass was in evidence, in that weird squishy formation that kept her bones from poking internal organs and made lying down or sitting more comfortable. No highly unattractive men, women, or livestock nearby in states of sticky indecency. No taste and olfactory sensation suggesting that a small party of gibbons had used her mouth for immoral purposes. She was fully clothed but not in an actual bed. She still had all three kidneys. That seemed to cover everything.

Now for the tricky part: the previous night. She combed through her short-term memory like a middle-aged man rummaging for loose change between sofa cushions. She hadn't drunk any beverages, suspicious or otherwise, or taken unlicensed medication. The last thing she could recall was playing a game of wack-a-mole, only it had gone a bit weird. There was something powerfully disturbing about the figures she hit, with strong hints of allegory. The name Stephen King and the idea of reflecting light rattled around in her skull looking for something to connect with. A highly active part of her brain told her that she had everything that was important and didn't really want to explore the subject further, and Terra took its advice.

The blond adolescent scooped up her tickets and headed over towards the ticket exchange stand, amusing herself by peeling off parchment-like rolls of dead skin and old scabbing on the way there. Because there are certain things that people do when nobody else is watching, Terra rolled up one of the larger sheds of skin and popped it into her mouth.  
"hmm…needs soy sauce," she commented aloud.

When Terra arrived at the ticket booth, she was relieved to see it was one of the unmanned variety. This was good because there was supposed to be nobody there, and that meant there wouldn't be a nobody either, that unpleasant, lingering feeling that comes from an empty slot in the brain where a human encounter should be. It was equipped with a slot to feed tickets into and a set of keys and screen that let you select a prize. It read as follows:

Gumball: two tickets

Toy Army Soldier- Five Tickets

Superball: twenty-five tickets

Astronaut Ice Cream: one hundred tickets

Plush toy, small: One hundred and fifty tickets

Hallucinogenic Syringe: Two hundred and fifty tickets

First Aid Kit: Three Hundred Tickets

Portable whack-a-mole handheld electronic game: five hundred tickets

Fried Snickers bar: seven hundred and fifty tickets

E-Z bake oven: one thousand tickets

E-Z kill zorch gun: two thousand tickets

Aqua Lad figurine, with vibrating action: Three thousand tickets

Healing Potion: Four thousand tickets

Minor Character: Five Thousand and Seven tickets

Herbert West's Reagant Syringe: Seven thousand and five hundred tickets

Beast Boy: Ten thousand tickets

Extra Life: Twenty-five thousand tickets

Army of the Dead: One Hundred Thousand Tickets

New Superpower: One Million tickets

Perhaps a more philosophically inclined individual might have questioned just how a vending machine could grant her a number of items which either didn't usually exist or had no right to be in any vending machine*. Perhaps even somebody with an even more keen eye for things would have pondered why somebody had scribbled a small heart next to the name Beast Boy with a pink sharpie.  
The blond geokinetic however was not such a person. Terra just stared with rapt intensity at the selection and started counting up her tickets with practiced speed. She was such an experienced carnival-goer that she didn't need to actually look at the tickets, she just needed to weigh them in one hand and measure the intensity of that distinctive cheap-ink-and-recycled-tampons aroma.

"Bugger! I've only got 9,999 tickets and I'm all out of quarters!" Terra complained to the empty air. She was relieved when it made no reply.

_Hmm. Well, I've only ever seen that Aqua Lad "toy" at a ridiculously high price in back-of-the-store sealed-plastic fan catalogues, so that's a given. I looove fried snickers bars, and I might as well get two astronaut ice creams. Round things off with a bouncy ball and some gumballs, and then, hmm, that reanimating syringe sounds cool, first aid kit might also come in handy…_

She licked her lips. She was feeling pretty lonely, and the silence was seriously pressing on her sanity. She slid in a few rolls of tickets. After she gathered up her food, game, and medical supplies, then she crammed her remaining units into the machine and punched a button.

There was a load groaning and rattling, a few high-pitched screams, and a groggy-looking person was ejected from the machine headfirst at Terra's feet.

"My name…my…my name is…Jonny…uggh."

_____________________________  
(33)At least, any non-japanese vending machine. To a nation capable of building machines that dispense beer, used panties, and insect collections, superheroes and reanimating serums are no challenge at all.


	11. Chapter 11

**I**

Raven didn't scream. She didn't stand and let a single tear roll down her cheek in a dramatic sort of way. She didn't fall to her knees, roll her head back and cry to the heavens above "NOOOO!"  
What she did do was turn around and haul her fat ass away, because the white chocolate nemesis had temporarily expended its beam-weapon, but it was still charging at her.

It is a well-established fact that a biped cannot outrun a quadruped over a long distance. The sharp, bright aura of pale magic was beating down on her like a desert sun, so she didn't dare risk a bit of flight or teleportation. However, Raven didn't have to outrun the creature for a long distance, she just needed to outrun it until she could find a convenient side-street to duck into. Four wide blue eyes darted left and right, searching for an exit. She managed to lay eyes on a darkened corner of a faded "Meaty Meat" poster and darkened color suggesting an avenue of escape.

The shadowy sorceress put on a burst of speed and flung herself into the divergent path. As she came in she temporarily turned her shadow into an umbral surfboard, allowing her to round the sharp corner without losing momentum. Even this small spark of power cost her, and she slowed to a stumbling walk, carried on more by the inertia of her jiggling mass than by conscious action.

Raven heard a distressing sound.  
Imagine the noise made by an overenthusiastic dog's claws scrabbling on a freshly waxed floor as the animal struggles to kill its momentum. Now magnify it a few dozen times, and add in ominous notes of structural stresses and steel road signs being bent over. Follow this up with a series of clacking hooves getting alarmingly louder, higher in pitch(34), and closer.

Raven didn't turn around. Centuries in areas with stampede-prone ungulates that could turn live humans into reddish smears ensured that anybody who stopped to look behind them when they heard hooves failed to pass on their DNA. The quasi-demonic adolescent female was now propelled by high-octane adrenaline, millennia-old survival instincts, and a general disinclination towards violent painful death.

Survival instincts aside, the hooded heroine was beginning to wear out. Like many habitual users of telekinesis, she didn't normally get much exercise. The most physically demanding tasks she engaged herself in were making snide remarks and organizing her bookshelf. Running was difficult enough for her without having an extra fifty-something pounds to lug around(35).

Raven's brain recovered enough power to realize that she was losing ground again. She tried for another burst of speed, but all she could manage was a leak of rapidity. Her stomach rippled. Her thighs were brushing together fast enough to start fires. Her butt cheeks shook like a couple of capybaras making out.

Raven took another turn and found herself running towards a brick wall.

Time for her became very, very slow.

In the subjective eons it took to turn around, Raven had formed a plan. She leapt forward and her eyes took in every detail of the onrushing monstrosity.

The seven hawk-like eyes were locked on to her, and her cumbrous, temporarily airborne body was reflected in yellow, red, green, blue, ultraviolet, infrared, and black. The stare was not hateful and cruel. The stare was not vacant and glazed. The stare was just very, very, intense and purposeful. It was the look of a carpenter focusing on the joist he was sawing through, or a gardener shearing away a difficult bit of hedge. Each eye seemed to have a faintest glimmer of ethereal light, a note of discord in its chromatic purity.

She had time to survey every lethal implement adorning the creature's digits. From pinky to thumb, the left hand was equipped with a scalpel, a hedge clipper, a wrench, a hook, a star drill(36), a small ball-and chain, and a can-opener. The right hand, from thumb to picky, was armed with a radial saw, an ice pick, a cruelly sharp barbeque fork, a hand axe, a hammer, and a dental drill. Each item protruded smoothly from the third finger-joint and was forged of the same cream-colored material.

Despite the hooves, the four legs were more human-like than horse-like in shape, and Raven spotted a few cracks and missing chunks along the creature's sides and thighs. Evidently those last few sharp turns hadn't gone entirely without incident. She felt the jelly-thick wall of air displaced by the leg-movement smack slowly against her like a stampede of asthmatic water buffalo. The clip-clop of its procession echoed and rang, the only sound in all of creation.

Raven's leap took her closer towards the huge creature in the slow-motion view of heart-shuddering crisis. It rushed at her like a glacier. She exhaled and tried her best to narrow her awkward pear-shaped body as she drifted under her enemy's torso and between the lethal legs. She became fully aware of its smell, the heavy and flowery aroma of cocoa butter. Pumping knees came within millimeters of her broad bottom. Her thick gut cushioned her impact as she grazed the ground, and rebounded with just enough momentum to take her out from under the array of skull-crushing legs.

Time caught up with her. Raven rose from the ground to see the white-chocolate centaur scrabbling in a desperate attempt to turn around. The space was too narrow. The momentum was too great. The creature tripped over its own feet, smacked its horrible face headfirst into the wall, its flailing arms shattered their wicked implements on the brick and concrete sides of the alleyway.

Raven reached into her mind and stilled her emotions to focus on a spell. This lonely Titan did not intend to give the creature any time to recover from its self-inflicted injuries. She reached into the elements and unleashed a ball of sun-blue fire with an apocalyptic-red core. Strafes of sub-zero coldness turned the limbs brittle and immobile while searing heat and chemical oxidization cut through the frigid mass like a diamond knife.

Raven reached down into the steaming rubble, some of it covered in frost, some of it melted into pools or charred to cinders, and picked up a lukewarm hunk of the white chocolate that had composed the creature's body.

Raven took a bite out of it, and allowed the faintest ghost of a smile to slip across her face.

"I should cut back. This stuff'll kill you."

(34)In accordance with the Red Shift principle  
(35)although judging by the level of moisture clinging to her suit she had already shed half that weight in the form of perspiration.  
(36)Gently spinning despite the absence of any visible join in the material or movable parts

**II**

Ryan looked at Starfire.

"No. That's not Starfire. That couldn't be Starfire. Starfire had more head, and she didn't have that gushing wound."

Her face twisted up in a grimace that just teetered on the edge of madness. She started sucking in air, her eyes screwed up against the oncoming storm of emotion.

The sugar-crystal entity hovered in the air, buzzing and twitching, drifting in a gentle circle. It turned to point its sharpest edge at Ryan, and primed itself to attack.

Ryan screamed. It was a good scream. It was a scream that would put opera singers to shame. The glass windows in buildings shimmered and rippled like the surface of a lake in a high wind before bursting into a rain of jagged light. Her lungs burned, her throat was dry, and still she screamed on, her body unwilling to take any other command from her shock-addled brain.

The hostile glucose formation vibrated for a few seconds, and then burst into pieces.

**III**

Jonny Rancid woke up sprawled in an awkward position and covered in something sticky. This wasn't very unusual. What was unusual was that all of his clothes, money, and internal organs were present and accounted for. He didn't have the throbbing sensation of steel balls crashing around inside his skull. His mouth had a faint aftertaste of caramel, rather than the usual cocktail of quasi-legal intoxicants and thrice-regurgitated bodily fluids.

The internal audit now finished, Jonny Rancid sat up to take stock of his surroundings. To the right of him was a whack-a-mole type arcade game. Directly behind him was a large vending machine. Directly front of him was a pair of bright yellow shorts that just happened to have a human body filling them. The garments were under enormous pressure, bulging like a hot-air-balloon, holding back a tide of swelling fat. This inspired a brief period of cogitation, after which he decided to tilt his head further up so as to examine the person wearing them. His eyes met a slightly rounded face against a backdrop of long highlighter-yellow hair. Blue eyes stared down at him with an expression of mild curiosity while the jaw and soft cheeks noisily masticated a fried snickers bar.

_There's something familiar about this uncomplimentary term for female_, Jonny thought. _Wow, I can think all the way to the end of a scentence, and, like, still remember how it began._

Jonny Rancid got to his feet and sized up the girl face-to-face. Something about the long blond hair, the deceptively vacant blue eyes, and the furious chewing tried to make repressed memories rise up like gas-bloated corpses floating to the surface of a bog.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked.

"I'm Terra, the sixth Titan" she said. "Pleased to meet you."

She extended a handshake and unveiled a broad smile.

Synapses sparked and Jonny's eyes widened.

"You! You're that crazy girl who tried to eat me!" he stammered, backing away and pointing a shaky accusatory finger.

Terra cocked her head and blinked at him.

"Oooh yeah. Sorry about that. In my defense, I was crazed with hunger and I thought you were a talking sausage at the time."

She gave a sheepish little grin and an apologetic shrug.

Normally this would not be considered sufficient recompense for attempted murder and cannibalism, but there was something inescapably likeable about Terra. You couldn't stay mad at her, not because she was such a generous or good-hearted person, but because your stock of adrenaline just simply dried up five minutes into any conversation. She also had a hopelessly cheerful and non-judgmental air, and most people Jonny met regarded him with a mixture of fear and contempt. This combined with Jonny Rancid's considerable supply of cognitive dissonance to wipe away any past events that shed doubt on the image he had of himself as a dangerous, anti-authoritarian, lone-wolf, unbeatable paragon of masculinity, and anything that caused him to run screaming for his life from a teenage girl definitely threatened this persona.

"Yeah, right" he said, eyes darting a bit. "So, what is this place?"

Terra often wished she was something she could never be**. As Terra looked at Johnny Rancid, one of her long abandoned desires came forth; the desire to be thought of as intelligent.

"It seems like some kind of magically-assembled carnival of souls," Terra remarked.

"Oh, one of those," Rancid said in the knowing tones of the truly ignorant.

"Yup. So, how'd you get here?"

"Oh, I was just cruising along on my hog with two major hot uncomplimentary term for females hangin' off me, only there was this big slow shiny wave and shit, and I just smacked head on into it…and…um, the last thing I remembered was tastin' caramel and waking up here," he finished lamely. The moment he sensed weakness, he rallied again with bravado and pig-headed arrogance.

"Anyway," he said, sticking out his chest and folding his arms in a manner that he thought made him look impressive and dangerous(38), "what are YOU doing here?"

Terra cocked her head and tried to adopt the tone Robin always used to lecture about......well she never paid attention to that but she knew the tone. "Why am I here? That's a deep metaphysical(39) question."

"Right, metaphysical," Jonny Rancid said.

Terra nodded gravely.

"Well, it all started when we faced off against this guy called the Chocolate Chip Cookie Caper. He had this cannon-thing that shot cookies and a force-feeding tube-thing that pumped out high-pressure cookie dough. I was tied up for most of the fight because I wore my baggy t-shirt that day, and when an updraft hit it I got blown onto a rooftop, cuz I've always been a bit on the light side."

She paused and looked down at the body of evidence to the contrary. Her T-shirt was riding up a several inches while her pot-belly overhung her pants button. She could feel the tightness of her undergarments against her rounded rear.

"Ah well. At least I don't have to worry about blowing away in strong breezes now. So anyway, while we were fighting this dude, his face came off!"  
She raked her hand across her face to indicate the peeling-action.  
"and it turns out he was just, like, made of cookie dough, only he had a bunch of special frosting done up to look like he had skin and clothes and stuff. Right then this HUGE tidal wave of caramel"  
Terra stretched out her arms in a futile attempt to convey the enormity of the caramel. In doing so her shirt was pulled up, exposing the rest of her rounded tummy and just a little sliver of neon yellow bra. Jonny Rancid suddenly became a picture of attentiveness.  
"came rolling down out of nowhere, and everyone ran away, well, me and Raven and Starfire flew away. I…I don't know what happened to the others."

Terra paused, and her eyes got distant and watery.

"Anyway, we all holed up in the Titan Tower until the caramel wave passed. Starfire suggested we pass the time by playing cards, but she kept getting confused about the rules, and while I was trying to explain bluffing to her Raven floated off somewhere, so we just pigged out on ice cream and honey mustard and watched the OC"

If Jonny Rancid thought there was something odd about eating ice cream with honey mustard, he didn't mention it.(40)

"So, we went outside after the wave was past, and everything was all quiet. There were all these bright neon colors everywhere and fruity names, like a mummers parade had exploded. Everything was totally quiet and creepy, and out of nowhere a bunch of giant gingerbread men started attacking us. We totally kicked their butts!"

Terra licked her lips and patted her stomach by way of explanation.

"Then we got kinda bloated and tired, so we shacked up in the mattress section of a mall for the night. In the morning this huge-ass monster made of chocolate came after us, and we all lunged at it, and it zapped me or something, cuz I couldn't move and I could barely breath and I smelled chocolate, then I got knocked flying, and after I landed somewhere I ate my way out. Then I got drawn by the sound of carnival music, played some whack-a-mole, stuck my tickets in the vending machine, and you popped out."

Rancid was leaning against a game stand with a bored, disdainful, pouting expression, as if posing for an album cover.

Terra paused and put her hands on her thick padded hips, scanning the horizon. Garishly colored buildings broke up the skyline like a very flamboyant mountain range. The lights of the carnival flashed, and the _Chord chord, chord chord, chord chord OTHER CHORD!_ jarred her momentarily from her observation with a wince. Candy bar wrappers, popcorn bags, broken beer bottles, and sticks that had once held something deep-fried and sticky littered the ground. She tried to remember if they had been there when she first arrived.

She shivered. This haunted fairground was no place to linger. She wrinkled her brow and set her brain to the task of figuring out what course of action to take next. A cross-section of her head would have revealed a metaphorical gerbil running on a hamster wheel connected to a pair of wires, struggling to go faster and faster until a tiny bulb lit up.

"I think I'll go find the other Titans. After all, if you survived the caramel wave, they could have too."

She beamed as an unconcious anxiety eased.

"Hmm, how am I going to do this? Think, Terra, think."

This time the hamster wheel/motor had a guinea pig in it, hauling furry butt with all its might.

_Think think think. Okay, we fought a chocolate monster, and a bunch of gingerbread men. Those are all candy-themed monsters. Therefore, they probably came from the same place as the Chocolate Chip Cookie Crusader and the tidal wave of caramel. Whoever or whatever sent all of these things probably had Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Robin captive. _

Terra focused her mind on an imaginary map of the city(41). She marked a big red "X" at the spot where she encountered the gingerbread men. She put Xs on the spots where they met Chocolate Chip Cookie Crusader and the giant chocolate thing. Then she made an arrow pointing in the direction each thing had come from. She made a really big arrow pointing to the direction the caramel wave had come from. Then she zoomed out and tried to figure out what they meant.

_What does it mean? Where is it all coming from? Why can't there be a big flashing neon sign saying "Secret Hide-out Here" like in cartoons? Why can't all the different encounters form a straight line pointing to an abandoned factory, or turn out to all be directly above the sewer line?_

She frowned and chewed pensively on her hair. The gingerbread men had come from two directions, so she set those arrows aside. The wave of caramel had started over to the west of the Titan Tower. That narrowed it down a bit. The chocolate behemoth had come in through the north side of the mall building.

_Sooo, if I draw lines that connect this X, to this X, and this X, I get…some sort triangle thing. Hm. Nothing that stands out, but it's a start._

"Okay, I'm going over there!" Terra said, sticking out her arm and pointing it somewhere northwest-ish. She yawned and stretched, her shirt rising again, pot-belly protruding, rounded butt poking out behind her, chubby thighs squeezed together, slightly thick arms waving aimlessly, then raised herself up on a hunk of granite and headed off.

Lacking anything better to do, Jonny Rancid followed along after her.

An orange-sized ball of dark chocolate followed along after Rancid.

(37)It didn't.  
(38)For three straight months in 2005 she was determined to be a futon  
(39)Terra secretly hoped she used the word metaphysical correctly. She didn't know what it meant but she knew Raven liked the word.  
(40)Honey mustard on ice cream is nothing compared with some of the culinary genius that strikes drunk stoned people at two in the morning.  
(41)drawn in crayon

**IV**

Pete had taken a laser to the chest.

Pete.

Pete the vapid little(42) Goth boy who had hit on her at the party.

Pete.

Pete, who talked to much, and didn't know how to deal with silence.

Pete.

Pete, the human stereotype.

Pete.

Pete had taken a laser to the chest for her.

The late Pete.

If you looked at her face, you'd see nothing. That wasn't surprising. Many people had mastered the poker-face. Many people could have blank expressions all the time.

If you looked at her feet, at the way she moved, nothing would be given away. How could it? She drifted along, silent as a ghost.

She didn't sweat. She didn't shudder. Her hands didn't clench.

If you could read Raven's thoughts, you still wouldn't see anything, because some people have so much self control that they won't even let themselves think certain thoughts. Controlling your thoughts, after all, is the first step to controlling your emotions.

But if you looked into her mind, into her soul, you'd see what was there.

What was there was mostly emptiness. It was vacuous conception, untapped and unexplored mental capacity, unused brainpower. Floating in it were rocks, platues, islands in a sea of nothingness, isolated portions of sentience, thought, and memory.

There were vast libraries and computer terminals that housed memories and spells. There were dark basements with dust-laden scrapbooks and locked diaries that contained repressed thoughts, forgotten memories, and unnoticed feelings.

Somewhere near the heart of it all was a little castle. It had a moat, and a drawbridge. It had stones that no ram could dent, and walls that no invader could penetrate. It was a refuge, a prison, and a solitary world.

The little castle had one very tall tower. In the tower was a window. It wasn't a big window. It wasn't the type of window that an eloper could climb into. It wasn't even a window that an aristocratic woman could let a rather expansive hairdo down. It was nothing more than an arrow slit with a height problem, like an air-hole in the stone.

On the other side of that window was a girl, small, shy, and dressed in white. She was young and she was ageless. She could be anywhere from a toddler to a ten-year-old. Age was just an idea anyway. How long you lived had nothing to do with how old you grew.

This little girl looked at a photo of a pale boy with eyeliner. It was resting on a shelf, along with a handful of other photographs. It was rather small, and on a lower shelf than the other four pictures, but it was still there and valued. She took the photo off her shelf, and pulled out a box from under her bed. She untied the string around the box, opened it up, and put the photograph inside. Then she tied up the box, pushed it back under her bed, and blinked away the tears.

That was all there was to see.

(42)Raven frequently thought of people who were several inches taller than her and a year or two older than her as "little"

**V**

Ryan had continued to scream after the entity shattered. She continued screaming for a long time.

Ryan had screamed until her voice gave out.

Because of this, when she saw the headless body of Starfire twitching and stirring, all she did was step back a bit and make a gasping noise.

Ryan didn't see Starfire, hero of jump city, or Starfire, her new friend. She saw a thing, wriggling, twitching, and moving, a horrible insectoid thing. It didn't even look human-shaped somehow. It was the way it moved. It didn't grope blindly or crawl and struggle. It moved with mindless purpose, the limbs slowly rising, straightening, and then snapping into place with a quick twitch of the joint, like a spider drowsily moving along in cold weather. Every now and then it twitched and jerked like a half-crushed fly.

At the very top of the neck, at the cluster of sticky yellow goop that passed for blood, something was forming. A bubble of clear, mountain-dew green was welling up, expanding like a balloon. Inside the globule something formed that was halfway between a skull and a helmet, wide arches where eyes would be, a nose-bridge, and a serrated plate of chitin where a mouth would be. Another pair of things made from the same green chitin, like two hand-saws, grew out to meet each other, snapping into place under the helmet-thing.  
A curling tube of pinkish-purple stuff rose out of the neck, uncurling like a seedling in time-lapse photography. Around the pulpy stuff, and the other tubes that rose out, there was something like a skull forming now, similar in shape, but with all the holes in the wrong place, and the jaw was about five different pieces that were barely connected. Long sheets of tubes and cobwebs of organic matter filled the space between the skull and the chitinous helmet.  
Tiny threads poked out through the holes in the chitin, wriggling like bloodworms. In the sockets of the skull two luminous green facets shapes, like chunks of irradiated honeycomb, swelled up, and were covered over with a black rubbery disk and encircled in a ball of white. Thick, orange hair pooled up, erupting from the holes at the back of the skull, and stretched the bubble to its limits, while the surface was clouded with a muddy flesh-tone. The hair burst out and spilled over, clinging to the figure, hiding the last moments of transformation.

Then there was just Starfire, wiping and licking the last clingy sheets of regenerative mucus from her face.

"rrg lurrr zulhg mmrrr, rrrghr, hlllk! Mllk, mrat, that's…that's much better" Starfire said as she brought her jaw into place with a sickening crack.

She blinked away a green glow and focused her newly regrown eyes. "Friend Ryan, are you well?"

Ryan clutched at her throat and swallowed a few times. She stared unblinkingly and rasped out "h…h…head. You're…head."

Starfire blinked.

"Oh, the regenerative process is not common his planet, you must be shocked at my biological difernces. .... if it makes you feel any better I found human ear wax so disgusting I vomited"

Ryan was silent and staring. If eyes are the windows to the soul, Ryan's would have had the curtains drawn, the shutters closed, and a couple of sturdy oak planks nailed on top of them.

Starfire adjusted her posture, hunching herself down to look small and less threatening, her tummy pooched out and overhanging her belt by quite a few inches, arms folded against her slightly-larger-than-usual breasts.  
"I mean to say that I have an unusually high healing factor."

Ryan drooled and twitched a little.

"Like your cultural hero Wolverine," she offered.

Ryan blinked. "Ooh, _like Wolverine_. Why didn't you say so?"

Starfire drifted down to meet her, gnawing a large chunk of the former crystal entity. She paused to frown at it, then looked at Ryan.

"Am I correct in thinking that I have you to thank for the destruction of this enemy?" Starfire asked.

"Well, I guess so," Ryan said.

"Good work casual friend! Now I must depart to find my fellow Titans to put an end to this sugar filled villainy!"

The pudgy Tamaranian was already starting to soar away, brick-orange hair swirling around her face and shoulders, thick legs squeezed together, her stomach sucked in as much as she could manage, arms pressed into her love handles, her rounded body streamlining for as much aerodynamic advantage as it could muster.

Ryan looked around, at the cold and empty streets, at the tiny bits of sugar crystal shard, at the broken windows, and at the very loud colors in a very silent world.

"Wait!"

Starfire spun around in midair.

Ryan scratched the ground with her shoes and looked down.

"Um, can I come with you?" She asked.

"Why, of course my newly found friend, I would be happy to have your company!"

She paused and frowned reflectively.

"I just think you should be aware that there is great danger ahead. There is great peril of the mortal nature, and there are likely to be large quantities of those carbohydrates which you earthlings find to be toxic."

Ryan stifled a giggle. "I'll be able to manage, deadly carbs aside."

She looked up at the zaftig alien hovering above her.

"I don't wanna slow you down though. Are you going to have to walk alongside me?"

Starfire grinned. "Do not worry friend Ryan, I have an idea."

**VI**

"Are you a hero or a villain?"

"Definitely Villain."

Robin blinked slowly and began to repeat his cycle of isometric exercises. In the unlikely event that he was released from this uncomfortable entrapment any time soon, he didn't want to be paralyzed with cramps. Anyway, it gave him something to do, and after the eleventh round he got tired of playing twenty questions with Beast Boy and Cyborg.

"Hmmm." Beast Boy screwed up his eyes and licked his nose, brow furrowed with single-minded concentration.

"Are you human?" The green polymorph asked.

"Biologically speaking, yes." Cyborg answered.

A grapefruit-sized sphere of dark chocolate descended from the heights above and landed in Weird Wally's hand. The top half of it slid back to reveal a roiling collection of what vaguely resembled blueberry jam. The nefarious candy man rose it to his nose and just sniffed, eyes staring into the middle distance.

_What is he doing with it?_ Robin wondered. _This is the second time he's huffed one of those things. It doesn't look like a drug. There's no change in his posture or pupil dilation. Anyway, I don't think there's any drug you need to breathe in for half an hour straight. He shouldn't even be able to consciously register the smell after that amount of time._

"Do you have superpowers? Like, real powers, not just a bunch of gadgets and money."

"No."

_Can it be some kind of olfactory code? Maybe a capsule of airborne nanobots?_

"Are you Red X?" Beast Boy asked.

"Wrong again." Cyborg smirked.

_It must have some kind of information. He gets thoughtful afterwards, just twirling that candy cane and staring._

"Are you a girl?"

"Yup."

Weird Wally snapped the chocolate and blueberry ball shut and flung it into the air. It stopped halfway on its upward arch, then drifted silently out of sight.

"Are you hot?"

"Nope."

_What kind of power system could it use? Did it have some kind of caloric sucrose energy matrix? Or was it just another annoying "you can't explain it, it's magic" type of thing?_

Beast Boy frowned in deep thought while Weird Wally strode away to perform more incomprehensible tasks.

"I give up, who are you?"

"Kitten." Cyborg answered.

Robin flinched at the name.

"Dude, how am I supposed to guess the right villain if you keep lying to me?" Beast Boy asked angrily.

Cyborg raised his lone eyebrow. "Why would I lie playing 20 twenty questions? It's not like any of us are going to win anything." He frowned, probing his short-term memory. "When did I lie?"

"The hot question, Kitten is totally hot. I was thinking it was her but the hot question threw me off the trail," Beast Boy said.

Cyborg snorted dismissively. "Okay salad-head, you all made us uncomfortable with your joke, you win. Now tell me your joking."  
Beast Boy rolled his eyes. "I think you need your oil changed. Let me run this by you again. I.....THINK.....KITTEN....IS....HOT"

Robin's face scrunched up in disgust until it looked like his eyes were trying to escape out the back of his skull.  
"If I had anything left in my stomach I'd start puking right now."

Cyborg shook his head and stared at Beast Boy with incredulity. "What is with you and crazy evil blondes?"

"Fine, I like blondes!" Beast Boy confessed. "What about you, General Grievous, any super-crushes you have?"

Cyborg cocked his non-electronic eye at him. "Seriously?"

"When am I not serious?" Beast Boy responded

Cyborg snickered. Beast Boy stared expectantly at him.

"Alright I'll tell you, but you have to promise not to turn into a tiger and eat my flesh at night."

"Of course I won't, I _am_ a vegetarian you know. Just spill it out already and quit being so dramatic!"

Cyborg took a deep breath. "It's Elasti-Girl"

Beast Boy winced and shook his head as if trying to dislodge a scorpion from his hair.  
"Dude! No! Ick! That's, like, sort of my mom!"

"What can I say? She's a famous movie star. I mean you don't become a world famous starlet for being an uggo."

Beast Boy stared daggers at his bionic compatriot.  
"I am so going to turn into a cobra and crush your internal organs."

Robin's attention was drawn away from this display of male bonding and superficial aggression by a soft bleeping on his communicator.

"Of course, the dead man's switch must have gone off by now," he whispered aloud to himself.(43)

The dead man's switch started out as an idea long before Robin had joined up with the titans. When you're a sidekick, one thing that you can reliably expect is to be kidnapped. Hardly a week went buy when he didn't wake up with the smell of chloroform still in his nostrils, bound, gagged, and suspended from some tall building or local landmark. Being abducted and held in a cramped space for long periods of time had taught Robin a lot of things. It had taught him ingenuity in tight situations. It had taught him meditation and self-reliance. It had taught him patience. It had taught him never to take anything for granted.  
It had also taught him that he really wanted to spend less time tied up and suspended over a pit of lava.

In order to achieve this end, it would be best if he had some way to alert any interested parties to his whereabouts. He did have Batman's tracers, but those tended to come off in the wash, and an adventurous young lad doesn't want his stoic disciplinarian father-figure to know his exact whereabouts at all times. Something like Jimmy Olsen's one-way communicator was out of the question. By the time he was aware of his situation, Robin usually found his mobility hampered to the degree that he couldn't press any buttons or flip any switches.  
It followed then that what Robin needed was a device that would automatically broadcast his location if he left home and went for a set length of time without giving a prescribed input, such as three hours without pressing a button.

Of course, Batman told him it was unnecessary, that if he didn't go running off all the time he wouldn't get into this sort of trouble and need an automated distress signal. Robin thought Batman would have felt differently if he'd ever spent fourteen consecutive hours in a position where the only available entertainment was trying to spit directly on the genetically enhanced bull sharks circling three feet beneath him.

All this goes some way towards explaining why, when Robin started his own superhero group, one of his first steps was to include his communicator with just such a device.

(43)Robin was no longer a sidekick, but it was hard to shake off the tendency to say things aloud in a dramatic, exposition-providing manner.


	12. Chapter 12

[b]I[/b]

"-and that's why I'll never ride a mechanical bull again," Terra said.

"Dude(44)," Jonny Rancid replied.

The first few notes of the titan's iconic call-to-battle tune chirped out from somewhere around Terra's midsection.

"Hey, your pants are beeping," Rancid observed.

Terra looked down, her view obstructed by several inches of protruding flab. She reached past them and fumbled in the tight loop of her brownish shorts until she fished out her communicator. It displayed a miniature map of the city, with a flashing yellow light marked with the words "Assistance Requested, currently captured and/or incapacitated, do NOT attempt to make audio contact".

Terra grinned. Things had just got a lot easier.

"Connect four! I mean, Bingo!"

(44)This useful male communication tool could mean yes, okay, I know, hello, goodbye, that sucks, that's awesome, or start the incision at the left temporal lobe, depending upon context and inflection.

[b]II[/b]

Raven touched down gently, slowly withdrawing the current of dark energy. Despite her recently increased girth, she landed silently and barely even jiggled.

Raven looked around at her surroundings. Everything looked so familiar. There was that broken streetlight. There was the fragile oak sapling with a small bird nest on it and a broken branch. There was that same store front with boarded up windows, and the boards inexplicably painted neon orange and pastel blue. How long had she been floating around?

Raven tried to take off again, but she felt a resistance. There was something pink and moist sticking to her boot. With a look of mild disgust, she removed the boot and telekinetically peeled the substance off.

The wad of gum spun gently in the air. Affixed to it was a wax-paper wrapper with lines of faded purple type on it.

[i]Weird Wally's Mobius Bubble Gum. Keeps people walking around in circles for hours, even psychically inclined individuals and spawn of unholy demigods. Mobius Bubble Gum is a trademark of Weird Wally Inc, Secret Hideout, Jump City USA. Weird Wally's Mobius Bubble Gum is for chewing purposes and confounding levitating spellcasters only. Do not attempt to stick Mobius Bubble Gum in any orifice other than your mouth. Mobius Bubble Gum poses a choking hazard and should not be given to children 63 and under. Mobius Bubble Gum cannot be used as a flotation device. Caution: this product may be hot, especially if you fish it out of a big tub of boiling radioactive goo. All rights reserved. [/i]

Raven raised an eyebrow.

"Hey!"

Raven heard a familiar voice calling out. She turned around very slowly to see Pete, stepping out of a side-alley.

His shirt had a hole in it, and his skin was peeling in sheets around a very red, raw area. The chalky white flesh of his flat, narrow stomach and smooth, hairless chest was thrown into contrast by angry fuchsia blotch. It looked as if he had sat in a tanning booth for ten hours with a reflecting panel and a magnifying glass. The mark looked painful, and his clothing near the wound was either burned away or singed, but he was otherwise unhurt.

In this situation, other people might have said something like "I thought you were dead!" or "are you okay?" Raven did not. It was obvious that he wasn't dead, and somebody wincing with pain probably isn't well enough to be called "ok". She squinted her third eye at him, checking for any illusions or abnormalities in his biorhythms that might indicate the person before her was a counterfeit or somehow reanimated. As far as she could tell, it was the genuine article.

Raven pooled together the various feelings, thoughts, inquiries, and unformed notions in her brain, filtered them down until she came up with a bare minimum statement, a form of address stripped of all non-essentials to get as much information as she could while giving away nothing, all without wasting a breath or a word.

"Where have you been?"

"After you and the monster took off, I just dusted myself off and tried to catch up."

Pete the Goth rubbed the moist sore on his chest.

"Uh, not that I'm complaining or anything, but why am I still alive?"

Raven paused. Inside, she wondered the same thing herself, and was rather chagrined that she hadn't come up with the answer before. She furiously cogitated until a satisfactory explanation had been conceived, and then broke it down into terms that her audience would understand. This entire internal machination showed up externally by Raven blinking again.

"The white chocolate construct was full of light energy magic. This has a caustic effect my dark energy magic and life force. The lance of energy it shot wasn't concentrated enough to do more than knock you over and make you a bit sunburned," Raven explained.

"Wow. I never thought I'd be better equipped to take a magic laser to the torso than a super heroine."

Raven prepared a response, but then the gem fastening her cloak beeped. She flipped it open to find the a map of the city, a dot indicating her position, and a dot farther north with the flashing words "request assistance".

"I'm going now." Raven said.

"Oh, alright," Pete said, deflating like a slashed truck tire.

Raven began to hover away, her rippling cloak and pear shape outlined against the sky like a midnight blue Hershey kiss.

She paused. Without turning around, she made an "Oh well, if you must, come along too" gesture. Pete perked up and began jogging after her.

In Raven's mindscape, a little girl in the top room of the tower removed a photograph from the box under her bed, set it back in its place on a low shelf, and did a rather animated victory dance.

[b]III[/b]

"Over there is the Pizza we visited before friend Terra rose from the dead and attacked the structure, although I believe it has now been rebuilt as a stellar object-male deer, and it would seem that it has been recently painted over in a most fetching turquoise and ultraviolet pattern."

"Ghk." Said Ryan, who couldn't scream because she was putting to much attention into trying to breathe some of the rock-hard sheets of air rapidly shearing past her, trying to tug the hair out of her scalp and flagellating her with her own clothing.

"But, perhaps that is enough seeing of sights. I must give up this meandering pace if I wish to make any progress towards our destination."

Starfire accelerated past the already alarming pace, transforming from an orange comet with a green tail to a solid streak of secondary colors.

Ryan's slender arms and delicate fingers sunk into Starfire's padded flab until she could feel the outlines of her binary skeletal system. Clinging on for dear life, barely managing to restrain herself from biting onto the Tamaranian maiden's neck for a better hold, Ryan asked "where are we going anyway?"

There was a sound like a squealing tires a thousand times magnified and a short yelp.

"I have just realized that in all my excitement I never paused to consider my precise destination! Thank you for providing this important insight friend Ryan."

She paused and looked behind her.

"Ryan?"

"Um, I could use some help…help! Please?" Ryan said, as she heard a slight tearing noise as the skirt she was clinging to gave way under her weight.

"Oh, of course! I did not mean to alarm you." Starfire said. She reached down, picked up Ryan by the scruff of her shirt collar one-handed, flung her into the air, and caught her on her back.

"That's g-g-g-good," Ryan said between chattering teeth, her eyes squeezed shut.

A beeping came from the gemstone on her tiny shirt/tankini/purple pleather skin growth. She reached over, turned it halfway counter-clockwise, and pulled the gemstone out. On the reverse side was a small digital screen displaying a minimalist map of the city and a bleeping dot with the word "Robin" flashing next to it.

[b]IV[/b]

"DUDE LOOK HOW FAT WE ALL ARE!", Terra exclaimed . For emphasis she grabbed her pot-belly and shook it. "I was totally freaking out about how fat I was getting and I was all "omg I am going to be the fat Titan" but now I don't need to worry about that, we are all porkers!" she gave Starfire and Raven each an affectionate poke in the tummy.

Starfire's broad belly jiggled a bit, and she gave a girlish giggle. "I am just like the boy of the dough from the crescent dinner roll advertisement."

Raven rubbed her comparatively smaller paunch and looked daggers at Terra(45).

Ryan was busy directing her suspicious glare at Jonny Rancid, who was in turn looking at her in a highly direct way that conveyed where his interest lay(46) in no uncertain terms.

"Isn't that guy, like, evil?" She said, trying to convey with her body language that if he didn't move his eyes she would gouge them out with knitting needles.(47)

"Aw, lighten up," Terra said, putting a friendly arm around Ryan and Rancid. "Who hasn't been totally evil at one time or another?"

Starfire, Ryan, and Pete raised their hands. Raven looked away and coughed.

Terra rubbed the back of her head. "Well, anyway, he can help us fight against these giant gingerbread men and rescue Beast Boy, Robin, and Cyborg."

Rancid gave a the-bars-are-closed-and-I-don't-have-anything-better-to-do shrug.

"Um," Pete said, hand still raised as if addressing a rather intimidating teacher, "does anyone remember seeing those when we first arrived?"

The building was a looming, half-sized scale replica of the Forbidden City, made entirely of peanut brittle. That had been there for a while. What had not been there were the six placemats, each with a plate, a glass, a set of cutlery, and a woven gold name-tag.

The one labeled "Ryan Edison" had a dark brown carbonated beverage, a bowl of cottage cheese with pineapple chunks in it, and a box of Whoppers Chocolate Malt Balls. The platter directed at Starfire had a large glop of glorb (alien fungoid dish that is outwardly indistinguishable from aged jello mould), a saucer of Grey Poupon Mustard, and a jar with some slimy things that crawled over each other. Another placemat had a name tag for "Pete 'Goth' Jones". It had some welsh rarebit, pocky, and a glass of foamy strawberry milk.

Raven's tray was rather wider. It had to be in order to accommodate an entire roasted goat, basted with fresh blood and pumello sauce. On the peripheries of the plate where some Ghirardelli's dark chocolate squares and chocolate-covered blueberries, along with a glass of expensive-looking wine. Terra's Platter had a footlong hotdog that looked, smelled, and tasted as if somebody had hooked a sausage skin up to a liposuction machine and flipped the switch from "suck" to "blow", a supersized frozen slush drink smelling of sunblock and colored an unnatural blue, and a choco taco. The plate with a name tag for "Jonathon Cecil Rancid" had a buffalo steak, slathered with barbeque sauce and mayonnaise, a beer mug filled with something clear and strong-smelling, and tater tots shaped like smiley faces.

"Well, this isn't suspicious" Raven said dryly.

"We haven't eaten in forever!" Terra whined, wiping some drool from her chin. "We should globble this up and kick some ass. I read some where that calories are linked to improved ass-kicking."

With that Terra all-but unhinged her jaw and started sucking down twelve inches of frankfurter.

"Friend Terra, I think Raven and I have concerns about the condition of the food. It could be a dastardly plot!"

From the general assembly there arose a sound like unto the coming of a freight train in a high wind. Terra, Raven, and Starfire all eyed one another's protruding midsections.(48)

Raven deftly pulled out a small quartz crystal and lowered it over the trays. She murmured some incantations, and the crystal gave a flash of pure white light. She then reached into a pocket and pulled out a small loop of silver wire wrapped around a shark tooth. She waved this over each of the food items, and then pricked her finger and let the drop of blood fall on the other end of the wire. The blood turned amber-yellow.

Raven put the occult tools away. "As far as I can tell, there isn't any form of poison or enchantment at work. It's edible as alien cooking and gas station food can be," with a brief glare at Terra.

"What kind of weirdo leaves free food outside his lair?" Rancid in between gulps of acrid-smelling intoxicant.

Ryan said "Maybe he thinks he is a classy supervillian," then paused to ingest a spoonful of cottage cheese with a PG13 moan of delight, "like a James Bond bad guy or Lex Luther."

"Less *slurp* talking *suuuuck* more fooooood!" Terra said as she worked on her meal, alternately sucking down slurpee and digging the creamy ice-cream center out of the choco taco with her tongue while trying to slow her pace enough to prevent a headache. Terra emphasized her point by licking her lips and belching.

After that, the companions took Terra's advice and dug in. Pete demurely nibbled his cheese-sauce comfort food. Rancid chugged hard liquor and noisily masticated meat and potatoes. Ryan consumed her small portion, slowly but with great relish.

Terra had drained her frozen beverage, and was just rounding off the meal by crunching up the taco shell. Starfire had cleared out her glorb, licked the mustard jar clean, and was just now swallowing the last horrid wriggly things making a bid for freedom. Raven tore off the goat head and pensively sucked the brains out through the back of its skull. She reached into the body cavity with a fork to extract the heart, liver, and entrails, setting each item on the plate to soak up the ghoulish marinade before daintily consuming it(49). Each of her companions was finished and tidied up long before Raven had picked the bones clean, finished savoring the wine, and popped the last expensive chocolate into her mouth.

Although Raven didn't let so much as hiccup when she arose from her seat, it was evident that she was the fullest. The seven-eleven cuisine hadn't made a visible impression on Terra's midsection, and Starfire's already thick abdomen was barely an inch thicker. Raven's paunch had nearly doubled in size, taught and distended and completely hiding her belt from view.

After the pair of Trios had finished their impromptu meal, they returned their attention to the peanut-brittle structure before them. The entrance was blocked by a large door of solid marzipan, devoid of lock or knob, and marked with engraved Sumerian text.

Raven's inner eye squinted against the glare of primal necromancy emanating from the door like a floodlight. She closed her mind to the aura of power and translated the occult proclamation.

"None shall enter without an offering of Human Virgin Blood. The blood of homosexuals not acceptable due to possible HIV risk factors," Raven read aloud, adding "that's the most politically incorrect inscription I've seen in months."

Pete stepped up to the shining candy portal, drew a glinting switchblade form his pocket, and, with a practiced, stylish air, swiped it across his forarm. After an initial horizontal spurt, he pressed his arm against the engraving, ensuring that not a drop of life fluid was wasted. The blood filled in the letters, then slipped out of sight as if falling into an invisible drain. More crimson dripped from Pete's arm to suckle the door's thirst, and still more yet. He looked at the marzipan door, his own blood siphoning into it, then back at Raven, Rancid, Terra, Starfire, and Ryan, then down at his watch, then back at the door again. He continued holding his bleeding arm against the door and started tapping his foot and whistling tunelessly.

"I am unfamiliar with this earth custom of blood-letting," Starfire said.

"It's a common Earth Ritual," Raven said. "It's usually complimented with the taking of Myspace pictures and the playing of Linkin Park CDs."

"I am totally freaked out by this guys," Terra said in a stage whisper.

There was a sickening wet noise, and the door turned bright red. The door swung open noiselessly, and Pete staggered back, rubbing the self-inflicted gash and purple bruises on his left arm.

"I think that door just gave me a hickey," he moaned.

Beyond the door was a flight of stairs made from crystallized pineapple. As Terra stepped through the doorway, Pete called out

"Um, do you guys have any bandages or something? Only my arm's still bleeding a lot."

Raven floated over and touched her hand to his arm. A black glow slid down the cut and the flesh was healed.

The corners of her mouth gave an upward twitch that could only be detected with an electron microscope.  
"Good as new."

"You have still lost much blood, friend Pete," Starfire inquired, hands clasped in an expression of concern. "Are you sure you are well?"

"That's officially nice for you to notice .........Billy Corgan.....but I think I will sit the rest of the soccer game out"

"I think he's trying to say he wants us to go on without him," Ryan said.

For an answer Pete fell to his knees and curled up under the tables.

Ryan, Starfire, Terra, Jonny Rancid, and Raven all walked up the stairs into open sunlight. As their eyes adjusted to the glare, they saw…

[b] MANDATORY TEASER/CLIFFHANGER[/b]

(45)Terra, as usual, would not noticed a dirty look if the glare in question came from Medusa.

(46)Just below the neckline

(47)Unfortunately for Ryan, Rancid was just as bad at recognizing subtle cues as Terra.

(48)It came from Ryan.

(49)Insofar as it is possible to eat blood-drenched internal organs daintily.


	13. Chapter 13

**CHAPTER 13**

**I**

The same building.

It was the same peanut brittle structure. There was the array of tables and empty plates out in front of it, and there was Pete curled up under the table, quietly singing "_…piece of youth, and our lives are forever changed, we will never…_".

Jonny Rancid surveyed the scene. ""What is that French word for something happening again? I think that is going on, or we are really fucking lost"

The only thing that had changed was the door. It was made of some red hard candy that smelled faintly of cinnamon, and chiseled on it was an engraving in Latin.

Raven translated "Door of Hellfire: Know that any who wish to pass this way must recite the true name of the 2nd Lord of the Fourth Pit of Hell."

Raven frowned. "His true name…Zorg the Sinner? No that's not it. Talrock the Undeniable, no he's more of phantasm. Coily the Spring Sprite? No that's not right at all. I hate drawing blanks…"

Terra's blue eyes lit up. "I totally know that guy! We used to hang out on the beach of the River Styx. He had a sweet-ass Dune Buggy."

Terra stepped up to the door.

"His Autonomous Cruelty, Cecil Warnerbakker"

The door swung inward, and they stepped up a staircase made of compressed pralines to again face the same building with a different door. Pete was still under the table, now curled up and dozing fitfully.

This time the door was a spiral pattern of lemon heads and botan rice candy. "Door of Allusions" was carved upon it in plain English.

"Ebenezer Scroo-I mean, I am the keeper of the Door of Allusions. You must answer me these questions three, ere the other side you see. Be warned that if any question is answered incorrectly, there will be a penalty of a wholly unpredictable nature, and no one will be given more than one chance to open the door."

Ryan stepped up to the door.  
"Ask away."  
Her legs were trembling, and her cyan flannel shirt was already soaked with sweat, but she felt compelled by an overwhelming need to prove herself in this company of super-powered individuals and one ordinary guy who just gave up several pints of blood.

The face on the door twisted into a dentally irregular grin.  
"What, is your name?"

"Ryan Edison", she answered, nervously flicking some stray sweat-sticky bangs out of her face.

"What, is your quest?"

"To aid Starfire and company in their rescue of the other three teen titans."

She moistened her lips. She kept her eyes locked on the luminous vapid gaze of the face, determined not to show weakness, while Rancid and Terra inspected the line of her bra now visible through a t-shirt made translucent by perspiration.

"What episode of the cult TV series 'Mystery Science Theater 3000' contained the last on-screen appearance of character/actor 'Joel'?"

"Umm, oh, I know this one, it's the episode where they showed 'Mitchell'!" She shouted out, giving a little jump of triumph.

The door just grinned.

She blinked.

"No, wait, it's SoulT-AAUUU-"

Ryan's scream was suddenly cut off as she vanished in a flash of violet light.

The onlookers had barely begun to react when Starfire's eyes turned green and she lunged at the door. She clawed futilly at some wavering transparent barrier that had sprung up on the door's surface that looked remarkably like a cheap special effect.

"What have you done to my friend?" she snarled, in a voice like the droning of a thousand wasps.

"She has been shunted horizontally through time and banished from this universe."

**II**  
Terra's chair creaked as she leaned back, pressing against it with all 623 pounds of her considerable girth. She smiled dreamily, patted her almost-spherical stomach, and let out a plaster-dislodging belch.  
"Oof, I'm full. I don't even want to _look_ at food for a week," she said.

"Yeah right. That's what you said five minutes ago." Beast Girl teased. "You just can't say no to another serving of my suckling pig, bacon and beef fat surprise."

"What can I *urp* say, BG, you're a marvelous cook," Terra replied.

"Well, I think that _you're_ a marvelous eater," Beast Girl said with a playful grin, extending her muscular arm to give Terra's tummy and affectionate poke.

Terra blushed.

"Your human standards of beauty are a curious thing," Starfire said as he struggled with his joystick. "Upon Tamaran, a female with Terra's proportions would most likely already have amassed six or seven husbands, assuming she did not devour any of them after copulation. I am given to understand that human men find fat tissues acceptable only when they are concentrated around the milk-producing glands, or moderate quantities around the defecation orifice. At least, this is what friend Spellslinger tells me." His bright green eyes returned to the video game screen.

"Oh gremplork, my animated character has been wounded!"

"You need to pay more attention to the here and now Star," Robin said gently while his character zoomed on ahead. "Too many people sit by and wait for something to just fall in there lap."

There was a flash of blue light, the second half of a prolonged scream, and Robin found himself struck on the head by 133 pounds of falling Ryan Edison.

**III**

"Who will be the next to pit their knowledge of obscure references and pop culture against infinite perils and uncertain death?" the face intoned.

Raven, Rancid, and Starfire all edged back. Terra stood alone, the whole of her mental powers currently occupied by the task of extracting a bit of hotdog gristle from between her teeth.

"Do you choose to take the test?" The face asked her.

"Wha? Yes! I mean, n-"

"Very well! You are bound to answer the questions to the best of your ability, or face immediate dismemberment and nostril molestation."

Terra gulped.

The face stared at her.

"What, is your Quest?"

"To rescue Beast Boy, Cyborg, and Robin, and maybe save the rest of the city." She announced shakily.

"What, is the name of the pulse rifle of the character John Criton in the television sci-fi serial 'Farscape'?"

"Winona!" Terra announced, beaming and wiping her brow with relief.

"Oh yeah, almost forgot," the face said, "What is your name?"

"Blackfire! I mean Ter-shit!" Terra said.

The door leered.

"As penalty, you shall be doused in the most toxic and repellant substance that nine hells can conceive of!"

A black pit opened in the ground, and a glistening multicolored wave engulfed Terra. When the gap closed, Terra poked her head of from the mass. At a casual glance the apparent viscous wave resolved itself into a pile of DVD cases. They all seemed feature the same film inside. Terra read the title aloud after she half-climbed, half-swum out of the collection.

"The Hottie and the Nottie. Go figure."

"Who next will face my challenge?" The leering face challenged.

Starfire cautiously stepped forward. "I shall."

"Answer me these questions three, aer the other side you see! What, is your name?"

"Korandr' of Tamaran" she replied.

"What, is your quest?"

"To rescue my friends and defeat the unknown force that holds this city in its clutches," Starfire said, gaining confidence with every word.

"What, is the unique human innovation which The Doctor enthuses about in the episode of the Doctor Who serial entitled 'Fear Her'?"

Starfire's eyes lit up(50).

"Edible candy ball bearings!"

"You are correct!" The face said, and the door swung open.

This door did not lead them to the same reiterated marzipan city. Instead they found themselves in a vast warehouse with piles of crates and brown packages that brushed the ceiling in areas, turning the cavernous building into a sort of haphazard maze.

Raven lead the way, keeping her eye on the blinking communicator, the one thing that made sense in these uncanny corridors.

The faded labels said things like "baking chocolate, 30lb. in 2.5 lb. units", or "Sugar, unrefined". The three titans(51) left deep footprints in the heavy dust(52), suggesting that nobody had disturbed the warehouse for years. Considering it was the center of a magical candy empire, and the path leading to the building had taken them through a scale replica of a historic city turned into some kind of recursive three-dimensional mobius strip, the place was surprisingly mundane. It was as dull and box-filled as the film Future Wars.

_Whuuuuuuuum whumwhumwhumwhum_

(50)Literally  
(51)Well, three titans and one villain/middle school dropout.  
(52)Except for Raven of course, because when you have levitation powers plus semi-permanent ennui and lethargy there's no need to walk anywhere.

**IV**

"Psst!", Cyborg said to Beast Boy. His human eye was glancing warily at Weird Wally, who seemed to be busy with something complicated that involved spun sugar, malted milk, and high voltage. His mechanical eye was also looking at Weird Wally. The two eyeballs were each telling Cyborg a very different story.

"What is it?" Beast Boy asked.

Cyborg squinted at Wally again. His human eye saw a tall thin man, fiddling about, only he had to blink a lot more while he was focused on him. The electronic eye, well, it told him a lot of things. From just a few of the conflicting reports he could conclude that Weird Wally  
A Didn't Exist  
B Was giving off enough gamma radiation to fry meat from a distance of two miles  
C Had infinite mass  
D was without any mass  
E Was transparent to all known forms of radiation  
F Absorbed ultraviolet radiation and reflected microwave energy  
G None of the above  
H All of the above

Cyborg shivered.

"Why can't you just, you know, morph out of your bindings? Turn into a snake or a fruit fly or something?"

Beast Boy's ears drooped. "No can do. When I turn into something smaller my muscles reflexively contract and I curl up real fast. If I try to pull a stunt like that now, I'd get my arms and legs torn from my sockets. If I try to turn into something larger, the manacles would dig into my growing flesh, and I'd get gouges several inches deep into bits that gush sticky red stuff. Either way, I'd probably pass out from the pain or die from shock before I got a chance to turn into anything else, plus there's the fact that I'd be bleeding profusely and falling from a great height, probably into a vat of boiling lard the way my luck is going."

Cyborg frowned. "We gotta do something soon. I think Robin's manacles are too tight, cutting off blood flow or something."

Robin was shaking his head back and forth, crooning to himself.  
"The house is h-h-haunted by the echoes of your echoes of your favorite songs..."

A small dark-chocolate orb drifted over and hovered around Wally's shoulder. Despite the lack of a face, hands, feet, or anything that might normally convey body language, it managed to give the impression that it was anxious and politely trying to get its master's attention. As WW continued to ignore it, the ball started actually bumping up against the side of his head.

"Roooooms are cluttered up with keepsakes, that have keeept toooo long, far too long,"

Beast Boy frowned. "I didn't know Robin could sing in three-party harmony with himself."

Wally got to his feet, frowned, and stood up again.  
"Well?! What is it?" He snapped.  
The ball popped open it's lid, and waved its pulsating, wrinkled dark-blue inner workings underneath Wally's nose. His eyes popped open.

"Inconcievable!" he said. "Gadzooks! Heavens to Betsy, how could they?"  
His hands began juggling objects of varying size and shape while he tapped his cane and frowned pensively.  
"I can't invoke the triradiate Djinn. The chocolate's probably gone cool and I've already taken my favor for this lunar cycle. Well then, better be,"

He turned to the ball and, still juggling away and tapping his cane, made an elaborate series of hand signals and whistled out a klezmer tune. The ball hovered and gave a little bob of acknowledgement, then whizzed off.

Weird Wally stepped strolled out into a lollipop forest, and returned carrying a single, dark indigo lollipop that must have weighed seven times what he did. It was rather unusual as hard candies of its variety went*. The candy portion was carved with intricate detail to resemble a gawking eyeball, bulging and vacuous like that of a giant squid. Instead of one stalk, it had several lollipops sticks all radiating out from the central mass in different directions, each one hollow and plastic. If you looked at any one of the stalks for too long, your ears started to hurt.

Weird Wally turned around and addressed Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Robin.

"I think you all should see this. I've been compiling some curious footage concerning your combat companions and their contemporary crime-fighting campaigns. I have consequently concluded you may like to share in this critical information."

Weird Wally then stuck a finger up his nose and let out a long, high three-note whistle through his left nostril. A cluster of the dark-chocolate covered blueberry balls** swarmed into the room and began exposing small sections of their dark lavender innards, each one plugging in to a lollipop stalk.

The carved eye on the lollipop blinked. It misted over with condensation, and then displayed a slightly distorted, monochrome image of the titan girls.

Cyborg cheered as the girls dispatched the gingerbread men in large numbers.

Robin shuddered, retched, and managed to vomit up a small quantity of liquid that his stomach had been saving for just such an occasion when he saw Starfire's face bust open like a watermelon at a Gallagher performance.

Beast Boy chuckled at the rude gaseous emissions, and glared at Jonny Rancid.

Weird Wally was watching the proceedings with animated interest.

"Ooh, this is where the automatic conditioning comes in. Boooring, fast-forward to the part with the massive blood loss. Now, oh wait, no, no, no!"

He lounged, tapping his staff, looking at the screen.

"They should never have gotten this far."

He looked up at the Titan boys. "Tell me, when you have taken some hostages, and it looks like an enemy faction is about to break in and free them, what do you do?"

"Give up?" Beast Boy offered up hopefully.

Weird Wally pressed a button, and the devices that held the captive Titans started carrying them towards a vat of molten chocolate.

"You kill the hostages."

(53)I mean, unusual for reasons other than it being several feet high.  
(54)Hereafter to be referred to as DCCBB


	14. Chapter 14

**CHAPTER 14**

**I**

_Whumwhumwhuuum_

The faint humming noise was getting on Raven's nerves. She was trying to maintain her concentration, but recent events had shaken her normally ironclad will. It wasn't the weirdness, she had dealt with that dozens of times. It was part of life in jump city. It wasn't exactly the sheer volume of supernatural power. It was more the prolonged exposure, the continual assault on her subjective perception of reality and the occult forces clanging against her supernatural senses, like a Metallica concert inside her eardrum.

Despite the omnipresent distractions, Raven had just about managed to tune out the magical white noise when a message popped in from her olfactory sense.  
_Chocolate,_ they told her.  
_So what?_ She replied.  
_Dark chocolate_  
She paused.  
_**Ghirardelli**__ dark chocolate, with that faint glutinous whiff that suggests the presence of a blueberry center._  
_Where?_ Raven asked, the task at hand receding in importance as sweet memories used her nasal cavity to hijack the central nervous system.  
_Right behind you!_  
Raven spun around. Normally, when a written narrative says that somebody "spun around", it means they rapidly twisted their torso and shuffled their feet so as to alter their viewpoint. In this case, it meant that Raven rotated 180 degrees without moving a muscle, replacing a view of her hood and ample posterior with a broad stomach and deadpan expression. She just caught a glimpse of movement and the impression of something dark brown retreating from sight.

She frowned. Raven was not one of those dull-witted individuals who chalk up any aberrant or uncertain event to their imagination, right up to the moment were an allegedly fictional creature rips out their kidneys to use as lawn ornaments. Instead of dismissing the chocolate aroma and momentary vision, she pursued it. The quasi-demonic dark-clad teenager drifted down the corner where she thought the apparition vanished, and again caught just a tantalizing glimpse of something dark and shiny in the corner of her eye. She chased shadows until she remembered to avoid another surefire means of meeting a terminally interesting fate: trailing behind the main group in hostile territory during a time of major magical monster outbreaks. With a suspicious glance at the boxes around her, she swooped back to rejoin Starfire, Terra, and Jonny Rancid.

It was a pity for Raven that she had only watched a few horror movies, and during the supplementary films of terror thrust upon her by Beast Boy she did not pay a great amount of attention. If she had, she might have avoided the third common error of adolescent characters in a scary situation. She might have changed the course of events and gained immediate insight into a pressing threat and immediate danger. She might have recollected the vague half-glimpses and psychic impressions of being followed she got during the solitary period of her journey, and from them drawn a conclusion. She might have learned something to her benefit.

She might have looked up.

**II**  
Terra, unlike Raven, _had_ watched a lot of horror movies, even of her own volition. Unfortunately, she wasn't very good at making connections or learning from other people's mistakes, so she didn't look up either.

**III**  
Ditto for Jonny Rancid.

**IV**  
Starfire made a spirited effort to join Beast Boy in the watching of the goresploitation films. They were usually the kind where sorority girls get their clothes torn off before they get repeatedly stabbed in the chest with suggestively shaped edged weapons. She had noticed the tendency of heroines to not notice lurching monsters several feet away from them, but chalked it up to limited human peripheral vision.

Starfire's compound eyes gave her peripheral vision better even than that of a human who wasn't a minor character in a horror movie. Consequently, she did look up.

DCCBB's were swarming overhead, orbs of shade-brown darkness with winking jelly-blue centers. They watched without eyes too see. They listened without ears to hear. They tracked her scent without noses to smell. There were dozens of them, darting, clustering, jostling just under the ceiling.

Starfire swallowed.

"Friends, I do not wish to alarm you, but I believe we have company."

**V**

"What are they doing?" Jonny Rancid asked.

"Just watching us," Raven said as she scrutinized the enigmatic edibles above her. _I hope_ she mentally amended.

Starfire gazed uneasily at the DCCBB, the perfection of their nearly-black spheres interrupted only by a tiny point of glutinous blue light.

"Hey, I think I found the exit!" called out Terra.

The other three rushed around the corner to meet her.

In front of them a whitewashed oak door. The word "EXIT" was painted on it in bright red letters.

"That must have been difficult," Raven remarked blithely.

A few feet away from the door a large blue button was set into the wall. It had been roped off with yellow caution tape, and above it was a painted sign saying "WARNING DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON FOR ANY REASON. THIS MEANS YOU TERRA!"

Raven looked at the sign, then at the button, then at Terra. The blond superhero was leaning back, her undersized shirt lifting a little to expose more midriff, thumbs in the pockets of her tight shorts, bright blue eyes averted, and attempting to whistle a tune. Nothing short of cardboard wings and an electric halo could have improved upon her picture of casual innocence.

"Don't even think about it," Raven said.

Terra lowered her head and folded her hands in a theatrical gesture of saintly obedience.

"You're still thinking about it," Raven said, with absolute certainty.

Starfire's eyes darted from Raven to Terra, back and forth, watching the psychological tennis match with interest. It was only her previously mentioned superhuman peripheral vision that allowed her to notice Jonny Rancid step over the caution tape, finger extended. Even then, she was still too late.

**VI**

There was a brief pause, like the silence after a loud fart in an elevator. Then the swarm of DCCBB shot towards them.

Raven tried to hold them back, catching them in a web of dark energy, but they strained and pressed, their collective assault grating against her will. Starfire hovered inches off the ground, incinerating the attackers with her bright green eyebolts. Terra grunted and clenched her fists, her eyes blaring yellow, and the descending cloud of chocolates was met with a rising flurry of slate, called from under the buildings' foundations. Jonny Rancid was doing his best to dodge and weave, sometimes knocking one off its course with a well placed fist.

Raven's wall of shadowy force was slowly weakening. Every time she focused on bolstering one section, another swath of midnight began to yield under the pressure of so many assailants. For all their small size, the dark chocolate delights were possessed of formidable strength. She'd be lucky if she kept this up for a minute.

All three titans were tight with concentration, edging towards the door while trying to conserve as much energy as possible for their counterattack. Jonny Rancid weaved in and out of each girl's field of protection. Every time he got close to the door, he had to leap back to avoid another DCCBB.

Raven knew she wasn't going to last. Terra's stream of chipped rock was sloppy but enthusiastic, and she seemed to have a bottomless well of energy to draw on. Starfire's eyebolts and starbolts eliminated anything that got past Terra, and you could almost feel the bloodlust and battle frenzy coming off her chubby body like waves of heat.

Raven kept losing ground. Her nerves were frayed, and it wasn't long before some patch of the shadowstuff was going to give. The best she could do was make a controlled breach, force the DCCBB to come through in narrow stream. She could handle that. They would be rushing straight at her, and although they were extremely fast, they didn't seem much good at making sharp turns. She grinned.

Terra and Starfire were back to back, nearly pressed against the wall. Terra reached out and flung the door open.

Jonny Ranid dove through the opening, knocking Starfire and Terra aside. They faltered, and a few DCCBB swished past them and down the hallway.

At the same time, Raven let a fist-wide hole open in her force field. The DCCBB flew through it in a solid mass of dark brown.

Terra scrambled through the doorway, and Starfire and Raven hovered in after her. Just as the column of oversized ghirardelli's delights was about to shatter Raven's ribcage, she ducked down and opened her mouth.

No human mouth could have chewed, much less swallowed, so many fist-sized delicacies less than a second. No human throat could have even taken that kind of high speed impact without the object in question bursting out through the back of the neck. For these reasons, at this moment in time, Raven was quite happy that she was not just a human.

Her sharp demon teeth slashed and masticated. Her bulging esophagus squeezed shards of shattered chocolate and crushed blueberry to her eager stomach, where churning muscular action and something more potent than peptic acid reduced them to goo. Her long demon tongue wrapped and explored each morsel, holding it just long enough to register the flavor of her favorite treat.

With each gulp, her belly got a little bit rounder, a little bit wider, a little bit bigger. It wasn't a lot, but the DCCBB were coming in very fast. It was still a bit full from the free meal she received outside, but Raven could digest quickly when she really wanted to. It was poking out a good seven inches, then eight, then nine, then ten. Tortured spandex groaned as she kept eating. She rested her small hands on top of her expanding midsection. Her belly reached past her fingertips, both elbows digging into the rolls on her side.

In less than a minute the entire wave of DCCBB had disappeared inside her. Raven snapped the doorway shut with a satisfying click, and a few thunks sounded as stragglers collided with it.

Raven turned around, clutching her rounded belly packed tight with chocolate and savory fruit innards. The taut globe protruding from her middle almost dwarfed the rest of her body. She took a brief, rare, unguarded moment to simply bask in bloated contentment, and lustily licked the last chocolate and blueberry smears from her lips.

She let out a sweet, heartfelt, quiet little moan of delight, terminating in a not-so-quiet satisfied belch. .

Then an ear-splitting high-pitched scream pierced the air.

**VII**

Terra and Starfire took out the remaining DCCBB. At least, they thought they did.

Jonny Rancid turned around to face one last whizzing shape. It was barely a few feet away, yet it seemed to take hours.

The halves of the sphere separated. From them swung out two forked spikes of blueberry innards, hardening and crystallizing on contact with the hair. Time returned to normal speed as the pain of those wicked little barbs impaling his skull hit him.

Jonny Rancid screamed. There was too much pain and nerve-choking terror for things like dignity or macho self-image. Raven stumbled over, still heaving under the weight of her several-feet-deep belly, and winced. That made Jonny more afraid. Raven rarely displayed any emotion, even in combat, and showed even less sympathy or empathy. If she was giving you a "dude, that must really suck" look, you know you were in trouble.

As Starfire flew back, too-tight skirt rippling in the faint breeze of her motion, and Terra ran over to assist, chest and stomach bouncing wildly, they saw the problem.

In between the two curved blades of crystallized blueberry, there was a third coming out, longer and narrower. It pierced into his skull with no sign of resistance. He groped and tried to tug it off, but it was stuck in.

Before anything could be done, Raven, Starfire, and Terra were blinded by a spray of blood as the candy coated orb of ill will pumped the pressurized lifeblood from Rancid's veins.

**VIII**

Terra screamed. Starfire licked her face clean. Raven looked down at Rancid's corpse, which seemed to be turning purple and starting to bloat extremely fast. She shrugged and hovered on down the corridor.

Raven felt her stomach starting to churn. The blueberry filling was digesting a little too fast. She could feel it leaching into her body. Something was…off. Before she could explore the sensation, she noticed that Terra and Starfire were getting ahead of her.

Starfire had taken the lead. Her hair was twitching and waving like a sea anemone. Her prehensile tongue flicked in and out of her mouth and her nostrils flared.

"I smell Robin!" Starfire declared.

Raven floated in front of her and raised a quizzical eyebrow. "You _smell_ Robin?"

Starfire nodded. "Indeed. I would recognize that _yagoth_ aroma anywhere! The rich, savory flavors, the hints of male pheromones, the salty edge of perspiration, and the overwhelming stench of hair gel fumes is unmistakable."

She closed her eyes and drew deep breaths, mouth watering as she took in the amorous olfactory information.

For answer, Raven raised another eyebrow. Her expression looked a little strained.

"Friend Raven, are you feeling all and right?" Starfire asked. She had just picked up a new scent on the air. "You appear rather blue about the underwater breathing slits."

"Plus you look really fat," Terra said. "Moreso than usual. I think you're getting fatter right now."

Raven glared. She weighed a number of ready-to-hand snide rejoinders, then looked at herself. Her normal corpse-grey skin tone had taken on a cobalt-blue hue. Her belly and butt seemed a bit rounder than they had seconds ago, and were swelling even as she watched.

"What the home?" Raven said. Alright, she had a slow metabolism, and she'd been putting on weight faster than usual, and she'd just had an oversized-chocolate-covered-blueberry binge, but this was ridiculous!

Starfire leaned closer and sniffed inquisitively, like a dog meeting a stranger.

"I fear that your perspiration has begun to smell of preserved fruit juices," she declared. "Perhaps you have ingested an excess of chewing gum? I recall a similar affliction befell Violet Beauregard in the human instructional hygiene film about the chocolate factory."

"That was a hygiene video?" Terra inquired. "I always thought it was just a children's fantasy movie."

Raven quelled annoyance at her easily-distracted companions. She was starting to _feel_ herself growing. It was an odd sensation, somewhere between being waterlogged and that once-a-month bloating. Her skin had gone from muted cobalt to a shade of indigo. The joints at her hips and shoulders started feeling stiff.

Raven furiously analyzed the situation and remained calm. She froze fear into morbidity, and boiled away irritation into contempt. Whatever unnatural expansion she was undergoing, it wasn't just fat. The swelling was too round and regular. Thighs, bum, and belly were all smoothing out towards each other instead of spreading into their own shapes, as if pressing against an invisible mould.

Starfire's remark rattled around in her brain. She hadn't chewed any gum, but she had eaten something blueberry flavored…  
Her eyes widened. The dark-chocolate coated blueberry balls were poisoned, or cursed, or filled with swelling potions, or something.

"Don't eat the chocolates!"


	15. Chapter 15

**CHAPTER 15**

**I**

The urgency of Raven's voice cut through Starfire and Terra's anxious babble.

Raven had gone from a plump pear-shape to nearly spherical in less than a minute. Her skin was a deep purple.

"I don't know what's happening to me," she said, and the tremor in her voice said that the admission had cost her. She tried to walk and found that her stubby limbs had seized up.

Starfire held Raven's stiff hand and gave her a consoling pat on the arm. "Do not worry, friend Raven. I am sure you will eventually recover from this affliction, and in the mean time you will not be unduly impeded. Your telekinetic powers will allow you to move and manipulate objects even if your corporeal body is fully immobilized."

Raven relaxed and sighed for a moment. She hovered up a little and began to turn around, then grunted.

"I'm stuck," she said. Her eyelids were lowered and her mouth closed tight, resigned to the latest inconvenience laid upon her by the universe.

Starfire spat on her hands and rubbed them together. This was not merely a theatrical way of indicating that she was about to do some heavy lifting. As she reached around Raven's sides, she rubbed the edges of her circumference, using her spittle as an organic lubricant, and gave a good, superhuman shove.

"Perhaps I should not have pushed quite so hard," Starfire thought aloud, as Raven began bouncing and rolling down the whitewashed hallway. She managed just enough bursts of telekinetic energy to direct her movement, but it's hard to remain calm and in control when you're literally bouncing off the walls.

Terra and Starfire chased after her, panting and jiggling. Their bulky bodies sped past the white hallways with bare fluorescent lights and suggestive stains on the walls. It just occurred to Raven, in between the winces of pain and motion sickness, that the hallway seemed to be getting smaller, when  
Thwunk.

Raven stopped moving. Her spherical body was wedged in tight. The room was still spinning a little, but she was fixed firmly in place. Worse, she was still expanding. The large passageway was feeling pretty cramped, and she didn't want to contemplate what would happen if she kept bloating up in this confined space.

Starfire flew over to Raven. "Do not worry friend, I shall extricate you soon!" She leaned over and stuck out her long, long, purple tongue.

"Um, Starfire…what are you doing?" Raven said. Her eyebrow was raised, and a thin note of anxiety entered her normally deadpan voice.

"I ah a-em-ing oo u-ih-hay oo oh ah ooh ay e-ay ih ih-oo-a-uh, eh ay-eh" Starfire said, as she wiped across Raven's rounded side with a big sloppy lick.

"StarFIRE! Please don't DO that! Really! It TICKLES! And I still WON'T be able to GET further down the HALL-way-hay-hay!" she said, shivering and squealing.

Terra rounded the corner and looked at the trapped, incapacitated Raven and Starfire soaking her in saliva.

"Hah! I knew it. Cyborg owes me five bucks!" she said, her face drawn into a smile of grim satisfaction.

Starfire's tongue rolled up into her mouth. "What are you implying, friend Terra? I was merely attempting to lubricate friend Raven's enlarged body so that I might better extricate her from this predicament."

Terra frowned and then giggled. "You said 'lubricate'."  
Her cheeky grin turned to a sad expression. "Aw man, I can only imagine the crude remarks and transparent double entendres Jonny Rancid would have made if he was still with us." Her bright blue eyes welled up with tears and she started sniffling.

Starfire patted her on her slightly soft back. "Take heart, friend Terra. We will all help comfort you through this grieving process."

Terra grabbed a handful of the immobilized Raven's cape and blew her nose. Raven winced and squinted in disgust. Terra then stared at the ground and blinked away the tears.

"Hey! I found a quarter!"

Raven stared at her. Starfire stared harder, here green irises straining enough that the individual facets making up her compound eyes were visible. "I am glad to see that you have recovered the loss of your companion Jonny Rancid with such speed," Starfire said.

"Jonny who?" Terra asked, as she popped a bit of dark chocolate into her mouth.

Raven's eyes bulged.

"Where did you get that chocolate?" She asked.

"Oh, it was just lying around. After it pumped all his blood out, the chocolate ball thingy made a weird plumbing noise, and then it, like, just fell off the dead biker guy, and it was totally hollow inside."

"There was no trace of this dire blueberry substance that Raven has warned us of?" Starfire asked anxiously.

"Nope," Terra said, giving one of her wide, carefree grins.

Raven frowned. "But then…what did it do with all the juice?"

"Uuuuungh!"

**II**

Cyborg strained and struggled to twist off his detachable arms. Robin squirmed. Beast Boy bent over his head, trying in vain to gnaw off his own arms and escape. The bubbling vat of chocolate fondue slowly loomed closer.

Weird Wally frowned at the shimmering screen while the Titans were conveyed towards a delicious demise. Concerned frowns and evil grins swarmed around his face when Raven demolished the entire swarm of blueberry sentinels. "Mm, good work there by me, nothing like a classic Xanatos gambit to keep things interesting, but, blethers, I hoped that one of the others might eat them. Its only a mild inconvenience to _her_. Good to see that Rancid fellow has started twitching again, but it's not enough to be sure. I'd better tighten up the aspect-ratios and set the looped hallway on claustrophobic nightmare, prime the psychic firewall,"  
He turned and looked at the three young men inching towards certain dessertification. "Sooo much time, and so little to do. No wait, reverse that. Or is it so little space and so much to occur? I always get my dimensions mixed up."

He tapped his candy cane pensively.

"Hmm, I just don't have time to actually _witness_ the savory destruction of these kids," he lamented, regarding his captives out of the corner of his eye. Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg tried to keep their faces from betraying any hint of hope.

"I could just go off. There's no way they can escape, and one or two gingerbread men should be sufficient to keep an eye on them," he mused.

Robin and Cyborg maintained careful poker faces, while Beast Boy averted his eyes and whistled innocently.

Weird Wally looked up at them, and then gave great, big, wink.

He reached down and switched a lollipop lever from "Unnecessarily Slow Dipping" to "Kill Captives Before They Are Rescued or Escape," and laughed contemptuously.

The conveyor belt whizzed forward and the titans felt boiling chocolate scald their skin.

**III**

Terra, Starfire, and Raven froze. The drawn-out, gurgling moan had sounded close. There were a few heavy, squelching footsteps, and Jonny Rancid came out from a side-hallway.

His whole body was engorged and purple as a grape. It wasn't exactly rounder or fatter, everything was just thickened. His legs were like clubs, his feet great ham-like masses with a few round toes on the end, and his arms had anatomically inaccurate bulges that Pop-eye the sailor would be proud of. One eye was half-swollen shut, the other had tripled its size and bulged halfway out of the socket with painful tightness. His face was frozen in a grimace of cartoon grotesquery. Too late, Raven noticed the stink of necromancy behind the blueberry aroma.

"Gruuuuuh!" Jonny Rancid elaborated, and lunged at Terra. He didn't bite her like an anthrophageous fiend. He didn't punch or kick like a normal human being. He just aimed his body and bludgeoned her with as much weight as he could direct. Terra was smashed into the wall and slumped to the floor. She struggled to rise, solar plexus tight, gasping for air. Her eyes flickered with flecks of gold as she struggled to focus her powers. The late Jonny Rancid collapsed on top of her with two-hundred and fifty pounds of bloated corpse. She felt one of her ribs crack.

"Shoth-RLKAH!" Starfire snarled, as she yanked Rancid from Terra's body. Gripping him by the neck, she swung the struggling zombie around one-handed and flung him down the hallway. He flew head-first into the far wall with a loud splat.

Starfire retracted her mandibles and pulled Terra to her feet. "Friend Terra, you are injured!"

"I'll be OW ow ow, okay-ish," Terra said. "I owe you one."

"Think nothing of it," Starfire said graciously. "Beast Boy informed me of the reanimated vermin that often trouble your planet."

Terra shuddered, then winced and groaned. The motion made her rib throb, but the mention of Beast Boy reminded her of the goal at hand. What had happened to him? What was happening to him now?

"Are you sure you killed it?" she asked.

Starfire nodded confidently. "I have destroyed the brain. That is guaranteed to deanimate the zombies."

There was a loud burbling noise and a shuffling footstep. Raven stared at the mass of dark violet goop reshaping itself into a head while the body advanced.

"I don't think zombies know that," Raven said.


	16. Chapter 16

**CHAPTER 16**

**I**

Beast Boy opened his eyes to find that he had not been converted into the world's sexiest chocolate fondu. He was suspended inches above the bubbling vat. Cyborg had his legs pulled up to keep his feet from dangling, and Robin's boots were getting coated with a fine spray as big bubbles burst.

Weird Wally's hand was reaching for the "Dump the Self-Proclaimed Heroes in the Vat of Bubbling Lethal Substance" button, but it was being restained-  
By his other hand.

His face was inexpressive and blank, but every other bit of his body language expressed conflict. His feet scrabbled around on the floor, muscled bulged and flexed, and his abdomen undulated and quivered as if something was crawling around in it.

"Oh? Is that it?" he grumbled through motionless lips. "You should have brought it up the last time we talked if you wanted to save them for something. We did. You didn't listen. We made a note of it. You didn't even get authorization for this! We had to act fast."

The schizoid dialogue became faster and higher pitched, until it turned into an unintelligible whine. The titans were riveted as the dialogue over their lives continued. They barely noticed the occasional splash of scalding chocolate.

Wally got his writhing extremities under control and pushed the "Don't Kill The Self-Proclaimed 'Heroes' Just Yet" button.

The titans sighed with relief.

Weird Wally turned around to face them. If his grin was any waxier you could have stuck a wick in it and used it for a candle.

"I'm sorry that you kids had to see that," he said. "I've just got a few, hrrrm, administrative issues and goal orientations to sort out."

"Um, not that I'm complaining, but why didn't you kill us?" Beast Boy asked. Robin and Cyborg fixed him with a pair of "don't push it" glares.

Weird Wally cocked his head.  
"I was hoping you could tell me that. You're a smart boy after all"

Beast Boy blinked.

Weird Wally stuck his thumbs in his ears and blew a loud raspberry. He laughed hysterically when the three heads jerked back in unison.

He turned around and snapped his fingers. Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth lined up in front of him, still in their outlandish regalia. Gizmo still had green hair, orange skin, disturbingly bulgy white overalls, and a facial expression that could make women barren. Mammoth lurched over with his curly-hair and sailor suit, dragging his massive lollipop like a troll's club. Jinx faded into existence like a reverse Cheshire cat.

"Percival/Mammoth, go into the cryogenic caramel tunnels. Dig out Professor Chang, Mad Mod, or Brother Blood, whichever you find first. Ralph/Gizmo, start thinking up a rhyming song that criticizes Raven for some minor character flaw."

Gizmo and Mammoth dashed off. Weird Wally put a fatherly hand on Jinx's shoulder and led her out of hearing range. He leaned over and whispered something into her ear.

"I bet he's leaving us alive to turn us into frosty-eyed goons like the HIVE guys," Beast Boy said darkly.

"Can't be. He would have done it by now, or made some kind of 'join me' speech. I bet he just woke us up to rub it in our face that we've lost," Robin quipped. "Still, there is something…odd about him. I mean aside from everything else. His motives don't seem to line up properly. What do you think Cyborg?"

Cyborg focused on the distant figures. "I'm wondering what he has to say to a mind-controlled Jinx."

Weird Wally didn't say anything. He just exhaled. If Cyborg's vision had been just a little better, he would have seen the cloud of fine powdered that drifted from Wally's mouth into Jinx's ear canal.

Jinx's eyelids fluttered.

"Think of this as a first step. The others will have to wait there turns, but I won't let you go too long with just one influence. It's important that nobody gets free reign."

**II**  
Terra scrambled back against the wall, pressing her back into Raven's bloated spherical form. She whimpered and stared at the undead ex-companion.

Raven focused her eyes on the advancing undead. Jonny Rancid's cartoonishly deformed limbs kept thrusting out in front of him with short, spasmodic jerks, every movement a jerking death spasm.

Starfire thought about all the other times Beast Boy's historical documentaries had turned out to contain erroneous information, and chastised one of herselves for this lapse of judgement, while the other facets of her awareness held a firm grip on boundless confidence, the joy of flight, and righteous fury, and tried to muster up some raw battle-hunger.

Starfire clacked her mandibles and licked her lips. Then she lunged. Rancid lunged back at her, but she was surprised by the result. She barely slowed down at all. There was a very noisy splat, and suddenly she was flying down a hallway, unimpeded, but sprayed with human gore and grape jelly. Jonny the Zombie lurched towards Terra with a rapidly shrinking Starfire-shaped hole in his chest.

"Oh gremplork," she said.

Terra gritted her teeth and glowed yellow. She struggled to reach the earth that was so far away, desperate to summon so much as a pebble to her aid, but the pain and terror were drowning her, that horrible **thing** stumbling forward like a childhood nightmare. One bloated, sausage-fingered hand thrust out straight at her heart.

SPLUT.

A solid column of building material had descended from the ceiling and smashed the zombie into the ground. It glowed black and rose again, sticky purple preserves and ropy entrails clinging to its underside. The twisted mass of broken bones and exposed innards tried to rise. Raven relaxed her power, and the shaft of concrete came down again.

SPLAT.

Raven raised and lowered the pillar with increasing frequency, mashing the mutilated carcass into an unrecognizable heap, grinding the unrecognizable heap into a thick slime, and then bludgeoning that until it was reduced to a very thin slime.

Raven groaned.

Terra gaped at the purple stain on the floor.

"Um, thanks."

"No problem," Raven said tonelessly.

"Really thanks. Like, thanks a lot," Terra said, sweating and rubbing the back of her head.

Raven acknowledged her gratitude by a slight incline of her head.

Starfire came whizzing back from the other end of the hallway, licking remnants of rancid off her face. "Congratulations on your victory friend Raven!" she declared.

"It was nothing," she said modestly. Her mouth twitched into a fleeting almost-smile.  
"Now, I'm open to suggestions about how I can get out of this situation," she said, wincing as her head throbbed. Maybe it was the bloating reaching into her brain fluid, or maybe she had just overused her psychic powers a bit.

"Certainly friend Raven. You need not-"

"SQUEEEEEEEEEEEN!"

A shrill discordant note echoed through the passageway. A seamlessly disguised door in the wall opened and four orange green-haired midgets stomped out. Each one was identical to the last detail, face fixed in a menacing glare, white overalls bulging at the sides, eyes clouded and dry. They looked like a troop of miniature Andy Rooneys afflicted with spastic colons.

The grim, joyless figures lined up, and began a badly choreographed, nightmarish song-and-dance routine. They stumbled and jostled against the three titan girls as the wheeled around like drunken pickpockets, but always managed to pull back before they could be hit with a blow of retaliation.

_"Gizmo hi-lo Gizmo-dee-doo, I've got a preachy lecture for you!  
Gizmo wizzo Gizmo doo-dee, if you're insecure you'll obey me!_

What do you get when sit in your room?  
Reading Garth Nix books in darkness and gloom?  
Stuffing your face with Ghirardelli's treats  
Being sarcastic and snarky, not sweet?

You've got poor social skills!

Gizmo-hi-lo Gizmo gaydar,  
If you're not Goth-y you will go far  
You can have conformist mediocrity too  
Like the gizmo-wizmo doompah dee doo!"

Raven fired a psychic pot-shot at then, but they were was already pulling the concealed door shut behind him.

"That was annoying," Raven said. The song didn't do any wonders for her headache either. It was throbbing now.

"No," Terra said, pointing. "It was a distraction."

**III**

The jellied mass rose like the wrath of the underworld. The purple pulp oozed forward and solidified into zombie Rancid. The eyes were different sizes, and one arm was half-sunken into a swollen chest, but it was still the same general shape.

Raven gasped. Terra screamed. Starfire flung the gelatinous horror as far away as she could. It splashed.

"Why won't he die? Why won't he die? WHYWONTHEDIE?!" Terra squealed. Her levels of indestructible zombie tolerance were definitely running short. This wasn't just _like_ a childhood nightmare, it **was** a childhood nightmare. She had woken up screaming on the ground. Her sweat had turned the dirt around her to mud, and in the throws of fear her power had subconsciously activated and carved an entire cliff wall into screaming faces. She had stayed awake till high noon that day.

"We need to get away," Raven said, trying to think through the throbbing migraine.

Starfire calmly turned her back to the regenerating zombie. "I believe that I can find a solution to your situation, friend Raven. There is a Tamaranian acu-pressure technique that can remove excess bodily fluid, but I must warn you before I use it. It is rather uncomfortable, and I suspect it violates at least one of your cultural taboos."

"URRRRN!" roared zombie Rancid.

Raven's immobilized body swelled and pressed painfully against the walls around her. "I'll risk it," she said.

Terra was sliding towards the floor mumbling something about sandwiches. Starfire felt concern for her friend's mental condition, but also knew that she was in a better place right now and there was an immediate danger to deal with.

She leaned over by Raven's receeding neck and extended her long, sharp, mandibles. "Do not worry Raven, blueberry is my favorite flavor."

Raven gulped.

**IV**

Dr. Chang, Mad Mod, and Brother Blood sat sulkily in a peanut brittle cage while Mammoth dragged it along. Without his tinted lenses and semi-functional lab outfit, Chang was rather diminutive and unimposing. Mad Mod's snappy outfit just made his withered flesh look more cadaverous. Brother Blood was the only one you'd trust to use the toilet unaided.

"Honestly, I am despairing of young villains these days," Mad Mod said. "I remember a time when you took a bit of pride in your work. None of this skipping about in spandex or thousand-strong armies of gingerbread men. If you did have some henchmen to help you out, they were either brainwashed citizens, ugly-looking blokes with accents so thick you could spread 'em on toast, or big clunky robots you built with yer own two hands."

Brother Blood nodded. "Standards are falling everywhere. Just look at my students. No real drive or sense of responsibility, they just get a few gadgets or a splash of radioactive goo, knock over a convenience store, and they think they're the next Joker."

"It comes from laxness," Chang said, as he rubbed at his red-rimmed eyes. "They have it too easy. Have you seen the so-called heroes we're getting these days? Even the rejected sidekicks think they can own the city with their super-friends. Don't even talk to me about these upstart 'anti-heroes', pretty boys who go around committing crimes in tight spandex to show off for the girls, and then they go and foil some doomsday device to be 'morally ambiguous'. They think it makes them interesting, crossing the line, ranting about moral relativity, when it really makes them look like pretentious little idiots!"

"Moral relativity! Don't talk to me about moral relativity! Back in my day, we didn't bother with moral relativity." Brother Blood fumed, his eyes starting to glow. "Kids today, with their complex agendas and personal philosophy and 'character depth.' Who needs personality when you can briefly obsess over people and blow up things?"

Dr. Chang shook his head and wrung his liver-spotted hands. "I can remember when there were REAL superheroes. Stardust the Wizard, now THAT was an adversary you could respect! I can bet you HE didn't bandy around about mental trauma or violating free will. He didn't ask 'well, is it alright to kill something that was once human?' He got the job done and knocked some heads together! You knew were you stood with him."

Mad Mod sighed nostalgically. "Oh yeah, he was a great bloke. No complaining about the burdens of responsibility or lengthy philosophical arguments. You went up against him, he went up against you, and if anybody got violently murdered or driven mad you bloody well didn't' blub about it. I also seem to recall he never made a long heartfelt speech about how blooming amazing his country was, he just went out and found anybody who posed a threat to it and hammered their skulls into their bum-holes."

His face tightened in a grimace of pain. "Cor, blimey! On that subject, I do recon the ol' boil's been acting up again. I've had it lanced twice but it just keeps festering up."

Chang subjected Mad Mod to a dismissive snort. "Hah! You think you've got it bad? Try having one that talks to you! That's what a lot of back-breaking labor around high-grade xenothium will do to you."

The cage jerked to a halt

Weird Wally banged on the bars with his candy cane.  
"Riiiise and shine! I've got to enlist one of you to do a little favor for me, so I have to choose the most powerful among your ranks."

The elderly evildoers grumbled and protested as Weird Wally checked their teeth, prodded them with his cane, and generally manhandled them.

"Alright. I know exactly how to decide which of you will be transformed in body and mind, and which of you will be disposed of! Life and death hang in the balance."

The Titans focused their attention, drawn by morbid curiosity.

Weird Wally raised his hand.

"Eeny meeny miny moe…"

**V**  
The serrated fangs that pierced Raven's distended flesh only hurt as much as a mosquito bite, but she kept her eyes averted. Experience told her that medical procedures hurt ten times as much if you saw what was actually happening.

"Azarath, metrion, zynthos, azarath, metrion zynthos," she muttered, struggling to calm her nerves, to clear away the headache, to not think about the unkillable zombie shambling closer or notice that an alien was sticking it's nightmarish pincers into her neck and sucking out her bodily fluids oh azar oh gods oh Trigon's unholy c-

"Azarath, metrion, ZYNTHOS!" she said, cutting through her own tide of panick.

It was the SOUND that was the worst. There was a lot of slurping and gargling, and every now and then there was a wet, bubbling, sound like somebody trying to blow their nose with a finger crammed up one nostril.

Granted, she did feel a bit better. She could move her fingers again, and the sensation was coming back to her extremities. The wall didn't press quite so tightly against her bloated circumference.

Motion drew her attention. The zombie was less than twenty feet away from them. She tried to pummel it with dark energy, but she only managed enough force to trip it up before the ache spiked up again.

She sized up the situation. Between the bloating headache and the revolting sucking noises, she could barely concentrate enough to bend a spoon with her mind. Starfire was fully occupied in the unthinkable process of orally draining the contaminating fluid from her body, and Terra was lying on the ground with a fractured rib trying to remember her what her favorite sandwich was, and this zombie kept coming closer.

"Not good," she summarized, when the swollen violet face loomed up at her.


	17. Chapter 17

**CHAPTER 17**

**I**

Terra lept to her feet, carelessly punching the zombie in the face and sending it reeling backwards.

With great solemnity, she said,  
"It's peanut butter and jelly time,"

Terra braced her chest with one hand and tripped the late Jonny Rancid. The clumsy and oversized body hit the ground face-first, unleashing a small splatter of purple fluid and jamming itself to the ground. Terra sucked in breath, leaned backwards and sat on it with all her strength. There was another loud squelch, and Terra lifted her tight and sticky trousers from the gelatinous mess.

Starfire had increased the intensity of her suction. Raven squeezed free of the hallway frame with Starfire still attached like some enormous bodily parasite. She was willing to follow along with Terra's plan.

Three very fat girls sat on the undead Jonny Rancid at once. The putrescent flesh was freshly flattened by three thick butts.

Terra hastily fumbled through her pockets as the mass of jelly bubbled and seethed, struggling to regain shape. She uncapped a jar of Peter Pan Peanut Butter and mixed the contents into the grape goo.

The mass bubbled less. Each time it rose up in a cohesive form, the oily peanut butter broke up the lines of emerging flesh and dissolved it into slime again.

Then Terra fell down and started wheezing, clutching her chest in red-hot agony, crying, and retching a little.

Raven's hand glowed with a silvery light, and Terra's rib mended.

"Thanks," she said, wiping the sweat from her brow.

"Just returning a favor," Raven said blandly.

Now that she was unstuck, she could see the faint outline of the door Gizmo had used. There was no keyhole or handle, but she could find a way in, and she was tired of racing down endless corridors.

She raised her hand, then turned.

"Starfire?!"

**II**

"-told me to pick the very best one and it is Y-O-U!"

Wally's finger rested on Brother Blood.

Weird Wally snapped his fingers. Mammoth lifted the lid, grabbed the protesting Chang and Mod with one hand, then shut it again.

"Impudent fool? You think you can bend me to your will?!" Brother Blood.

Weird Wally gave Blood a withering stare. Cyborg rolled his eye, Beast Boy chuckled, and Robin shook his head.

Wally popped a piece of bubble gum into his mouth and turned into a blond female adolescent. "Oh, my, gawd! Like, do people really still _say_ things like that? 'Impudent fool'? That is sooo twelve seconds ago."  
The blond cheerleader archetype popped her gum and looked at Cyborg. "Can you, like, believe what he just said? He does _not_ really talk like that. I mean, it's soooo pulp fiction nemesis-y!"  
Cyborg just nodded, rendered mute by the abrupt transfiguration.

The bimbo spat out her chewing gum and Weird Wally regained his form. "Honestly, I don't know how you put up with him."

He rubbed his hands. "Well, we'll soon change that."  
Brother blood burst through the marzipan bars. His eyes glowed and he flexed his robotic limbs. "You would dare to alter my personality? Cowardly conjurer, know that you face the great Methuselah Blood, high priest of the Cult of Slath, servant of-MPH!"

Weird Wally stuffed a chocolate orange into Brother Blood's mouth.  
"What personality? Don't you try to name-drop with me. I'm not impressed by your fancy titles or your relationship with a demonic deadbeat dad."

Blood spat out the orange and focused on Weird Wally. His eyes blazed, and then Wally dropped his cane. Weird Wally's eyes slowly went pink, then turned red.

"How may I serve you, lord Blood?" Wally asked in a dull monotone.

**III**  
Starfire was laying on her side. Her belly was swollen to twice it's previous size, and it was undulating and thrashing as if badgers were fighting in it. Her skin had turned bright red, her face was still splashed with blueberry juice, and her hair wriggled.

"Mmmmm I am RRRRN alright friend RA-ven." Starfire said, her voice warbled and distorted. "I am merely processing the toxin that permeated your body system in my eighth stomach so that I might synthesize an antidote in my crop should we encounter the same form of attack again."

She got to her feet with the help of Terra. The red color was already fading and her stomach was becoming less violent.

Raven blinked. _Where was that door?_

"Bloody home," she swore. She couldn't remember were the seamlessly-disguised-as-a-section-of-wall door had been.

Raven reached for her communicator and felt nothing but fat.

She got a sinking feeling.

"Starfire, Terra, where are your communicators?"

The other two titans fumbled about their midriffs and love handles to no avail.

"Those midgets will pay," Raven said.

"Was there not something familiar about them?" Starfire asked.

Raven racked her memory. "Not that I can think of."

Starfire twitched. She flared her nostrils and waved her mandibles about. "Robin is in danger! The scent grows stronger!"

Without waiting for a reply from her friends, she dashed off down the hallway and banked a sharp right.

Terra looked at Raven. "Follow your nose?" she suggested, and ran after her.

**IV**  
Brother Blood addressed his newest mind-slave.

"Summon my former students. With them at my side, I can refit this sweet shop into a proper evil lair, and establish my school, or blow up the city, or um, kidnap my arch-nemesis Cyborg and figure out why he can resist my power."

Cyborg flushed red. "I'm right here you stupid monk!"

"Oh. Fine then. I'll build a new school on this site, and destroy the city, then learn how to adapt Beast Boy's shapeshifting abilities to fulfill my maniacal obsession with him!" Brother Blood said, gesturing broadly. Weird Wally walked off to retrieve Gizmo and Jinx.

"Wait, I thought you had a maniacal obsession with Cyborg?" Beast Boy said, frowning in concentration.

"Right! Cyborg. That's what I meant," Brother Blood snapped.

"Why would you use this site to build a new school if it's just going to get blown up when you destroy the city?" Robin asked.

"SILENCE! My motives are very consistent and well defined! You're going to become mind-slaves soon so you'd better get used to obeying me WITHOUT QUESTION!" Brother Blood's head became enormous in contrast to his body during this angry rejoinder, and a few wavy red lines were still hovering over his head as steam leaked from his ears.

Weird Wally came back trailing the three fixed members of the Hive Five.

"How may I serve you, Brother Blood?" His voice was utterly expressionless. His eyes were still bright red, and he idly twirled the candy cane in his left hand.

"You have done enough for now. I'll think of a suitable use for you later."

Something that had been bothering Brother Blood popped back into the front of his mind. Chang and Mad Mod were still being held in one of Mammoth's meaty hands. They had stopped struggling and were passing out from lack of oxygen.

"Put them down Mammoth! By the seventh circle, didn't I teach you children to respect your elders?"

"Out of the frying pan and into the fire," Robin said.

Beast Boy leaned over towards Cyborg.  
"Any chance you could do that magical robo-jesus thing again?"

Cyborg flinched. "Definitely not. I told you, that was a one-time deal."

Beast Boy raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Oh come on. You did it before. I mean, what possible thingy would stop you from repeating it? Do you need to get the crap kicked out of you to use your anti-Blood psychic lazers or something?"

Cyborg gritted his teeth. "I don't want to talk about it."

Beast Boy wiggled his ears. "Why don't you make a speech about how the 'human' inside you is what lets you overcome Blood and makes you different from everyone else, huh? Anyway, if you defeated Blood with your human side, how come the rest of us humans can't do that?"

"Look, it's very simple," Cyborg said patiently. "It all comes down to-"

"How may I serve you?" Wally asked. A hint of urgency had entered his voice.

"What?" Brother Blood blinked. He had given the wretched man orders already.

"May I serve you rare, medium-rare, or well done? May I serve you with orange sauce and a garnish of parsley?" With every word, Wally's tone became more acerbic. He grinned. His eyes were still glowing bright red.

**V**  
Brother Blood stumbled back. He stared in disbelief. "What? You can't be saying that. My mental hold is still intact. I can FEEL your mind under my thumb!"

Weird Wally stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it around until the tip of it poked out the opposite earhole. "You mean _this_ mind?"

Brother Blood strained, probing his psychic hold. "Who…what are you?"

Weird Wally leaned in close. "I am Legion, for we are many." Then he bonked Brother Blood on the noggin with a comically oversized hammer.

Wally turned back to address the Titans.

"I wish to set up a little surprise to test the abilities of your companions. Because I'm feeling generous, I'll let you decide its nature. Just think of a horror film and I'll extract the primary elements from your mind."

Robin, Cyborg, and Beast Boy all broke into a sweat. Five eyes darted around the room. Three brains raced frantically, trying to concentrate on the ceiling, on elephants, on anything other than a horror movie. Beast Boy was trying very hard not think of a particular popular horror movie series with some very nasty and graphic-

"Right!" Weird Wally snapped his fingers. "Thanks for the info. I'm sure that will prove a most entertaining challenge."

Robin and Cyborg glared at Beast Boy. He stared at the ceiling and whistled.

"What…did…you…think?" Robin asked, clipping out each word in an icy calm.

"Well, there's at least five of them, and the title rhymes with 'jaw'," Beast Boy said apologetically.

**VI**

Starfire stopped where the corridor branched out in two different directions.

"The scent ends here," Starfire said uncertainly.

"Which passageway is it coming from?" Raven asked.

"The scent ends here," Starfire repeated. "I cannot smell Robin down either passage. It is most perplexing. Of course, this nemesis seems to have a vast number of spatially unconventional structures." She flew around the small space, sniffing at the ceiling and floor.

Terra came around the corner, panting and wheezing. "Hey…wait up!" Her face was red as a beat.

Raven raised an eyebrow. "Terra, you were only a few yards behind me."

"Easy…for…you to say," she gasped out, pausing to grab a section of tight soggy T-shirt shirt and wring the sweat out of it. "Some of us...can't…just fly…everywhere."

Terra leaned against the wall for support and disappeared through it.

**VII**

A six-foot éclair fluttered through the air on wings of golden butter. It hovered inches above Weird Wally, cooing and bubbling softly.

"What's that? Somebody's penetrated the illusory wall?"

The éclair undulated in frantic affirmation.

"Oh fiddlesticks!" Wally cursed. "This is far FAR too early! It's just not convenient! I'm not READY yet!"

Brother Blood was quietly sneaking away when Weird Wally cracked the back of his legs with a candy cane blow.

"Be with you in a minute," he said, eyes elsewhere.

Wally pulled a notepad out of his pocket and flipped through it's contents. "Hmm. Plan27-Alpha-G, pavlovian conditioning forces the would-be rescuers to consume the chocolate coated remains of victims, no, not enough time. Plan ABC XYZ, wouldn't work, besides who can find some large geese at this time of year, Plan 9-yes! The psychic loop cookies!"

Weird Wally grinned and snapped his book shut. He reached out and blew on a small electrum whistle, producing a sound like a series of car horns.

The Chocolate-Chip Cookie Crusader was at his side in an instant. The silent mass of bubbling cookie dough saluted.

"This won't take a second," Weird Wally said, as he snapped into a baking outfit and fumbled around in. CCCC's chest. He yanked out a huge glop of sticky batter and splashed it into a bowl. The living doughboy took this treatment without protest or alarm.

"Hmm, semi-animate, good stock, really all I need is a couple of central nervous systems, well-seasoned with experience and touched with a hint of old-age memory loss."

Mad Mod and Dr. Chang had come to and were inching away. Weird Wally whistled the first few notes form the 18-12 overture, and Gizmo and Mammoth appeared to block their paths. Weird Wally stuck his finger in his mouth, pulled it out dripping with saliva, and then turned around to jam said finger into Brother Blood's ear before the malevolent monk could throttle him. Blood screamed, spitting sparks and blood. He fell to the ground as the moisture short-circuited his hardware.

"That's gotta be the worst wet willy I ever saw," Beast Boy said, but his heart wasn't in it. He was thinking about some of the bigger words he'd heard Wally use.

Cyborg worked it out first.

"You're going to make COOKIES out of their BRAINS?!"

"Well of course I am!" Weird Wally said indignantly. "I can't just throw them out or leave them lying around. After all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste."

Beast Boy managed not to laugh at that.

Mammoth held down the two screaming elderly men. The curly locks and hat brim put his face into shadow. Gizmo the Oompah Loompah hurried over to Mod and Chang with what looked like a very large can opener and an indecent expression.

Weird Wally loomed over the partly paralyzed Brother Blood. He raised his candy cane for a magic zap, then thought better of it.

"Jinx, come over here, I've got a job for you."

Jinx slunk over towards Wally laconically, tossing her own magic wand back and forth like.

Gizmo's tool started whirring. Mammoth cracked a few bones trying to keep the evil old folk in place.

Cyborg ground his gears as he strained against the restraints. Beast Boy half dislocated his arms trying to shapeshift his way out. Mad Mod and Professor Chang were immoral criminals, but Cyborg and Beast Boy weren't. They couldn't just watch while a couple of ancient men get their heads sawed open to make _cookies a la Lecter_. Robin had either reached acceptance of the grisly fate to come, or was lost in a distance place where reality didn't touch him.

Cyborg couldn't look away. Beast Boy asked, through clenched teeth, "Cyborg, if I run out of vomit, can I borrow some of yours?"

Weird Wally was indifferent to the horrors going on behind him. He just grabbed the two dripping masses from Mammoth and shoved them into the mixing bowl. Wally wiped his hands and gave Jinx a sheet of lined pink paper. "This spell should give him an appropriate terminal disease. Cast it to help him get 'in character', then dismantle all those silly robotics."

She looked down at her former headmaster. She looked at the incantation in her hand, and the Swiss army attachments growing out of her wand. For the first time since the eye-glazing, her outer expression and inner life seemed to be in total harmony.

"With pleasure."


	18. Chapter 18

**CHAPTER 18**

**I**  
Starfire poked the wall. Her finger passed through cold air.

Raven followed her. The chamber beyond was a honeycomb of branching caramel tunnels shored up with beams of dark chocolate. Glowing bars of white chocolate were set into the walls at regular intervals, and shadows stirred beyond the hazy caramel translucence.

Terra spun round to face them. "Oh my god, you just missed something amazing! When I fell in here there was, like, this great big ringing, like a bell, and I was about to bite into this giant éclair when it grew a couple of wings made out of butter and flew off!"

Starfire shrugged. For all she knew most wild éclairs were capable of areal maneuvering. Raven gave Terra skeptical look number 23(55), and followed her along the tunnel.

When they came to a split, Starfire sniffed each passage, and indicated the one to the left. Raven kept lagging behind as she divided her attention to focus on the magical auras. Whatever was going on here took a **lot** of power, and she hadn't been able to figure out the source. There was no major element channeling. There were no god-matrices or demon realms being mined for energy. She couldn't pick up any high amounts of love(56), so that ruled out Mother Mae-Eye. There wasn't a substantial source of chaos magic for general access, and it seemed too massive for small-time sorcerers like Jinx and Mumbo Jumbo. Some distance away, she could detect a hodgepodge of conflicting power nodes, many infernal, but all of them put together weren't enough to account for this state of affairs.

Then there was the white chocolate monster. Light alone should not cause that kind of damage to a half-demon. She wasn't a vampire, despite Beast Boy's theories to the contrary. To have such a power-damping effect it would have to have holy magic behind it, energy from sanctified religious individuals and/or pure souls. If that cocoa butter abomination was a priest or an innocent babe, then she was a sparkly bloodsucker.

She pondered these concerns as she tagged after the other titans in the claustrophobic caramel corridors, so she was the last one to notice the heavily armed gingerbread men.

(55)The "Are you high, or just crazy and stupid?" look  
(56)love actually is a powerful source of thaumic energy, but as far as cosmic forces go it is slightly weaker than the stubborn determination of a passenger trying to prove some inappropriately large luggage will fit in the overhead storage bin.

**II**

"-and you won't need THIS bit either!" Jinx said as she plucked the last blinking diode out of Brother Blood's skin. She tossed the circuitry onto a heap of bloodstained bionics.

The malevolent monk had passed out from terror before Jinx even started the amateur surgery. Cyborg was grateful for that. The speed and eagerness had unnerved him. Her use of that can as a lever to detach the kidney casing, and then welding off the bioregulator with a concentrated blast of black magic and superheated strawberry ice cream, made his gears chill. A suggestive comment she had made at the HIVE Sadie Hawkins dance kept coming up in his head with a more ominous double-meaning.

Jinx admired the heap of meat thoughtfully. She gave the bloody edges a few prods. Exposed organs and gaping wounds were mercifully concealed by congealed vanilla body casts.  
She pulled out a stack of DVDs, lit a candle with green flame, and muttered the words of power.  
Beast Boy was riveted by the transformation. The barely-living vestige of Brother Blood had grown back arms and legs, albeit thin and feeble ones. He was seated in a wheelchair with strawberry cushions, chocolate armrests, and vanilla-pocky spokes. An IV pouch fed into his withered arm. The wheezy clicks of his breathing suggested that some respiratory aid was hidden under the grotesque puppet-like mask. A small sticker with the words "Hello, my name is Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes Used In Picture-Puzzles" was affixed to his shirt. She finished off the spell by heating up two drops of sugar glaze and flicking them through the eyeholes.

He could see the little touches in that mask and the withered flesh drawn from his own terrified memories and vivid imagination.

She twirled around her sugar-encrusted gaze met Beast Boy's grimace of fear. "How do you like it?" she asked.

Beast Boy gulped. Everyone said he didn't think enough, or accused him of not thinking. Right now he wished he _was_ brainless. His imagination ran wild. He thought of all the sinister traps that shrunken figure could devise. In his minds eye, Terra, Raven, and Starfire screamed as various bits were divorced from their bodies, and struggled in various mechanical nightmares, only to fail or suffer grisly mutilation in the end. His thoughts turned to his own detachable extremities. What if _this_ was why Weird Wally had kept them alive? Would he and his friends serve as guinea pigs for death-traps designed to punish petty sins? Would he be torn apart by a mechanical winch for being provocatively handsome or sliced very slowly from the feet up for replacing Cyborg's coffee with-

The parade of horrors was interrupted by a loud "ding!" Weird Wally pulled on a pair of Hello Kitty oven-mitts and pulled a tray of cannibalistic cookies out of an easy-bake oven. The dough had stretched and risen to cover up the sigils etched into it, and the bits of grey matter had shriveled and roasted until they looked like charred nuts or raisins.

Weird Wally piled the cookies on an electrum serving tray. The tray was lifted up by the Chocolate Chip Cookie Crusader. The cookie dough construct dashed away on its errand.

Wally clapped his hands and rubbed them together. "That should keep our guest's occupied for a little while. In the meantime," he turned to Gizmo and Mammoth. "Get the artist formerly known as 'Brother Blood' whatever he requires. He could use a couple of able-bodied lads to construct those cunning devices he's famous for."

Beast Boy frowned at the oven mitts. Hello Kitty oven mitts. Hello Kitty was Japanese. Inuyasha was Japanese animation too. Something about this guy reminded him of Naraku. He didn't laugh like Naraku, and he wore a lot less eyeshadow. Maybe it was the elaborate plans and back-up plans? Was it the unshakeable smugness?

Beast Boy strained his synapses. His subconscious was trying to tell him something. There was something he knew in his marrow about _what_ the entity styling itself as "Weird Wally" was.

_Can't you just spit it out?_ Beast Boy asked his subconscious. It didn't answer.

**III**

The legion of cookies wielded peppermint drills, rock candy pick-axes, and peanut brittle shovels. They were decked out with chocolate helmets as well.

Starfire primed her energy bolts. Terra drooled and stretched her head towards the nearest cookie to take a bite.

"Stop," Raven said. Her companions froze. The gingerbread men carried on their work.

"These ones aren't hostile. We've seen the warriors, these are the workers, like ant castes in a nest. They'll just carry on their tasks, _unless_ we give them a reason to defend themselves."

As Starfire sniffed along, Raven observed the activities of the crunchy creations. It looked like mining. Each time they got close to a humanish figure, they switched to light excavation tools and unearthed the figure in a thin sheath of caramel. The blond criminal brat Kitten was loaded onto a cart with Dr. Light and a pair of identical twins she didn't recognize.  
She felt the thrumming pulse of so many lives, trapped in caramel like insects and amber. Each one had been suspended with last moments before unconsciousness full of terror and confusion.

Terra just eyed her surroundings hungrily. That custom-made feast outside the warehouse entrance felt like a long time ago.

The petrified figure of a nameless child stared through caramel walls at Raven. _So that's the power-base,_ she thought. _Soul magic._ Living souls, so full of passions and fears, energy and will, were an abundant source of magical energy. They were nearly indestructible, so they'd just provide a steady "current" of power until the next apocalypse. She thought back to the white chocolate centaur. Wasn't there some forbidden magic that made demon-hunters with the souls of seven innocent children and ordained holy folk of three different faiths?

Ten souls had been enslaved, just for a "silver bullet" type weapon to use against her. Those same ten souls were probably still hanging about the ether, stirring in quasi-conscious states like restless sleepers. They weren't in pain, but it wasn't exactly heaven.

Raven glared with four red eyes, then blinked two blue eyes and shook her head. She would rescue her friends, liberate the city, and punish this magician, whoever or whatever it was. She just might not do it in that exact order.

Starfire turned her head. A new smell had caught her attention.

"These baked delights appear to be a delicious treat! I detect no hints of the toxic agents present in the blueberry balls and suspect they are safe to eat," she announced, eyeing a plate of solid electrum laden with oven-warm cookies.

"Cookies!" Terra said, licking her lips and spraying her companions with a spray of drool.

"Well, just one each won't hurt," Raven said grudgingly. "But then we go straight after Robin."

They each grabbed a cookie. Terra said they tasted familiar in a way she couldn't pin down. Starfire appreciated the protein-rich mixture. Raven thought they tasted a little greasier than most cookies, and wondered if it the recipe used lard instead of butter.

The electrum plate flashed.

"These baked delights appear to be a delicious treat! I detect no hints of the toxic agents present in the blueberry balls and suspect they are safe to eat," Starfire announced, eyeing a plate of solid electrum laden with oven-warm cookies.

"Cookies!" Terra exclaimed. She licked her lips and drooled.

"Well, just one each won't hurt," Raven said grudgingly. "But then we go straight after Robin."

They each bit in. The gold-and-silver serving tray glistened with light.

"These baked delights appear to be a delicious treat! I detect no hints of the toxic agents present in the blueberry balls and suspect they are safe to eat," Starfire announced, eyeing a plate of solid electrum laden with oven-warm cookies…


	19. Chapter 19

**CHAPTER 19**

**I**

Gizmo's score of oompah-loompah doppelgangers reunited. Mammoth returned from his intensive labors and wheeled off the modified Brother Blood to preside over his domain of booby-traps. Weird Wally tossed Gizmo and Mammoth candy bars like milkbones tossed to dogs. He patted Jinx on the head, ruffling her hair like a proud father, and handed her a small toffee that twitched and wriggled. She popped it into her mouth without a word.

Wally rubbed his hands together until a small fire started.

Robin raised his head.

"They'll beat you."

Weird Wally stared at him.

"I'm sorry? What was that?"

"_We'll_ beat you," Robin said. "You think we haven't faced off against villains with God-lie powers before? Everyone acts big when they have a home-turf advantage. You can reshape reality, and do lots of magic tricks, and send wave after wave of easily defeated minions till the cows come home. It won't matter. In the end, we'll break your toys, and snatch away your power base, and you'll be as helpless and defeated as those old men you taunted and killed."

"Really?" Weird Wally asked. A nails-on-chalkboard edge had entered his pleasant voice. "Well let me tell you something, KID. I've met two-bit magical hacks like Mumbo Jumbo and Mother Mae Eye, and they aren't a patch on ME. Rest assured, you could meet me without minions, without this fortress, and I'd still beat me. You could meet me in your own tower, with you fully armed, and me buck naked, and I'd not only have you outmatched, I'd have you OUTNUMBERED." His body language was harsh, but his body was worse. It shuddered and rippled.

"Then why don't you try?" Robin sneered.

"Because I'm not some overconfident nitwit who can get baited into an 'honorable' single-combat by a hero with a few tricks up his sleeve," Wally snapped. He licked his hand, smoothed back his hair, and regained his composure.

"Sooo, let's see if those plucky young girls have made it past the subliminal-loop cookies."

**II**

"Well, just *urp* one won't hurt," Raven said, tossing down another cookie. The plate gave off a nimbus of light. Three pairs of eyes went cloudy and distant, then refocused.

It was a simple enchantment. It was basic and subtle enough to get in under the radar of Raven's defenses. It was powerful enough to overwhelm Terra's one-track mind.  
Starfire wasn't so simple.

Each time the mind-loop had passed through the group, Starfire's dominant conciousness node had been repressed. The nearly identical bubble of awareness was shunted down her neural core to be replaced with a fresh one. As long as fresh schizoid mind-fragments kept popping up, devoid of relevant short-term memories, the net effect was the same.

Starfire only had a finite supply of thought-fragments. While the subliminal loop reset the short-term memory on Raven and Terra's mostly-human brains, her recollection of the first cookie broke surface like a fart in a bathtub.

"Those cookies look *burp* delicious!," Terra exclaimed.

Raven rubbed her tummy. "Well, just one each won't hurt."

They snatched back their hands when a Starbolt incinerated cookies and plate.

"Hey!," Terra shouted.

"We have been deceived," Starfire snarled. "While Robin lingers in peril, we have been gorging upon ensorcelled protein-compounds, caught in the thrall of some nefarious illusion!" Her mandibles were extended and her eyes blazed.

Starfire rolled her compound eyes and snorted, scanning the area. She peeled back her lips to show serrated chitin and fangs. Righteous fury lanced through her thought nods and filled her hands with emerald flame. Her senses heightened, straining for a villain, a nemesis, somebody she could punish for stalling her progress while her Robin was in danger.

There were only her two friends, the caramel caverns, and the smell of burnt cookies. She vented her frustration by firing off another volley of starbolts at the plate's molten remains.

"Gremplork," she said, with feeling. She retracted her pincers and returned to follow Robin's scent.

Terra and Raven stared on in shock as the feral, razor-toothed, menacing alien resumed her upbeat and confident demeanor. Terra gave Raven a "did that just happen?" look, and was answered with a tiny nod. They trailed after Starfire like frightened children in the wake of mom's pre-thanksgiving dinner meltdown.

As they reemerged in the warehouse, each Titan was dropped down a separate trap-door, sprayed with knock-out gas, and hit in the head by a medicine ball. A pre-recorded voice crackled out.

"Want to play a game?"

**III**

Starfire awoke to find her arms and legs bound to a chair. Shreds of dream and half-remembered fictions loomed up in her mind. She screamed and twisted, expecting a suggestively-shaped tentacle or edged weapon to lunge out of the darkness.

Her excitable thought-fragments were quieted by calmer voices in her protean mind. The works of fiction from "admirers" on the internet site device-for-moving-air untruth spot crude-tool-for-capturing-fish had been just that.* Compared with the horrors, eldritch and mundane, that could have faced her, the TV monitor with a puppet-deathmask was downright cute.

"Hello, Starfire. I want to play a game" the mask said.

"Unless it is Making Apology or Lateral Domination of an Industry, I doubt I shall find it enjoyable," she said suspiciously.

"You have wasted your life. You have committed the sin of wrath, but you have an opportunity to escape. Live or die, it's your choice. .You are in Mad Mod's anti-starbolt chair. The room is being filled with a slow poison, the only antidote-"

Starfire stared at the arms of the chair very hard. Then she melted them with eye-lazers.

"Hey! That's cheating! You're supposed to work out the riddle and suffer a survivable but painful fate to achieve a moral lesson about your own failings!" The puppet squealed.

Starfire eye-blasted the television and resumed her search for Robin.

*When Starfire learned of the earth-culture nexus "Google" she had looked up the first thing that came to mind, the titans themselves. The slashfic she encountered, written by people with more hope than practical experience, had her fumbling with numerous misconceptions about human anatomy for weeks.

**IV**  
"Hello, Raven. I want to play a game," the sinister puppet said.

"I don't," said Raven. She flew up out of the trapdoor.

"It worked for Dr. Light," Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes Used in Picture Puzzles muttered.

**V**  
Terra opened her eyes to meet the glare of a TV screen and a leering puppet mask.

"Hello, Terra. I want to play a game. You have wasted your life. You ran away from problems, you ruined a perfectly good volcano-base, and you lied about yourself. Your crime is the sin of -incidentally, you can't fly, can you?"

"Um, not unless there's a big enough rock around." She could sense the layers of steel, concrete, plumbing and insulation separating her from the natural rock strata.

"Alright, just wanted to get that out of the way. Your crime is the sin of hubris. This room is filling with knock-out-gas. The door is pressure sensitive, and will only open if you weigh exactly twenty-one more pounds than you did when you came in. Do not try to deceive me. There are cameras hidden all over the room. If you don't solve the puzzle in twenty-one minutes, you will pass out, and a trap-door will deliver you into a spike-filled pit of poisonous acid with piranha-alligator hybrids swimming in it, and then your hands will get cut off."

"I've never killed anyone. Well, I've never killed anyone, except for that one time when I killed some people. But I won't kill _you_. I'm offering the gift of life. Live or die, it's your choice."

Terra raised her hand.

"Um, yes?"

"What's hubris?" She asked. "Is it that kinda-spicy stuff you spread on crackers?"

"Hubris is arrogance and willful stupidity," Brother Blood said. It was hard to tell through the mask, but he seemed to be getting angrier by the minute.

"Ah. Okay."

Terra paused, then raised her hand again.

"Soo, I sold out my friends to their enemy, tried to kill them, crushed the people of jump-city between my Nike-clad feet, and you're punishing me for being proud and stupid?"

The puppet-masked villain was silent for a few seconds. Then the screen went black.

Terra shrugged. "Oh well. It's too bad I don't have any ideas on how to escape this elaborate death-trap. Guess I'll just have to pass the time eating this delicious roast ham and fried ice cream until I think of something."

With that Terra expanded her head to ten times its normal size for comedic effect, and swallowed a handful of food.

**VI**  
Weird Wally was leaned over his candy array. Electric lollipops and free-energy-producing gobstoppers pulsed with power, processing more data than a cyborg accounting firm. He was utterly engrossed by the seven-dimensional map showing the invading presence that penetrated his secret lair.

Jinx snuck up behind him. She skipped and leapt, using minor currents of probability flux to ensure the Brownian motion of air molecules neutralized the sound she made. She was careful to avoid passing in front of any light sources or reflective surfaces that might give her away. She raised a finger to tap Weird Wally on the shoulder.

"Can I help you?" he asked without looking up. Jinx drooped.

Jinx stood mute. Her glazed eyes met his imploringly.

"You're allowed to speak freely whenever you're alone with me," he said.

"Why don't you just stop the other Titans from reaching us at all? Couldn't you stick them in some 3-dimensional mobius strip or put seventy-five miles of floor between them and the center of the lair?"

Weird Wally met her eyes. "There's two reasons I won't do that. First, time, space, and magic are all relative to each other. The more distort time dimensions, the less distance I have to work with, and if I put too much thaumaturgical sub-space between us, the more time flows in their favor."

He stood his candy cane upright, then climbed on top of it and started doing a pirouette.

"Secondly, you wouldn't ask a fish why it swims, or a bird why it sings, or Slade why he wants an apprentice."

"I guess not," Jinx said.

"I can always come up with another reason, or change my mind. If they get too dangerous, I can deal with them somehow."

"You mean, just shoot them?" Jinx asked. She vaguely remembered taking "Why Don't You Just Shoot Batman? A Master Criminal's Dilemma" as an elective at H.I.V.E., but couldn't recall any of the specifics.

"For starters, I'm not sure it would be lethal to all of them, and nobody fights harder than a self-styled hero with a fallen comrade," Wally said. "I don't want tedious and pointless deaths. Torture, yes, pain, yes, transmutation, yes, but death? I don't like that much."

"You killed Mad Mod and Chang," she pointed out, as she tried to get her own wand to stand perfectly upright unassisted.

"They were just dirty old men. These girls have interesting possibilities, not unlike yourself."

Jinx winced. She could still feel fungal roots spreading through her skull, probing her mind. That toffee-coated larva was squirming around in her digestive track like a house-hunter checking for dry-rot.

"What's happening to me?" she whispered.

Wally reached down and ruffled her horn-like purple hair.  
"**We** are the music makers. **We** are the dreamers of dreams." He smiled, his eyes distant and far-away. "You're just going along the way. Soon, _you_ will be several of _us_. It will hurt a bit, but not as much as you think, and once you let go get through the existential crisis and recognize how much the 'there is no self' statement applies to special cases like _us_, everything will be fantastic."

Wally hopped down from the handy cane, picked it up, and looked at his watch.

"Hmm, quarter past butterscotch. The others seem to be integrating well enough, so,"

Jinx froze. Her eyelids clenched and her lips retracted. She tried to run away and hide inside her own skull.

Weird Wally reached into his ear, and pulled out a wriggling nightmare. It was ghostly and transparent, little more than a shape in the air. It had fingers without hands, faces without heads, and teeth without mouths.

The glaze on Jinx's eyeballs grew opaque. Her mouth split into a cheery grin, and she called out "welcome aboard!" as the apparition swirled in through her ear.

**VII**  
Terra licked her lips and yawned. She tried to recover her thoughts as the post-binge haze lifted from her mind. "Hmm, exactly twenty one pounds, and the door is pressure sensitive."

A tiny figure of the hero Kilowatt inside a lightbulb appeared over Terra's head. She grabbed her distended gut and sloshed it back and forth. "I bet there's twenty-one pounds worth of food in here!"

She stepped towards the door, then hesitated.

"Or would that be twenty two? Nineteen? Lessee, the glazed ham was about seven pounds, there were three pounds of kielbasa, less than six ounces of cotton candy, the booby-trapped plastic desk was twelve pounds at most, the booby trap in the desk was five pounds, I'm not sure how much that paralyzed guy with bad make-up on his face to make him look dead weighed,"

Terra took of her socks and shoes, unleashing a cascade of debris and lint, and continued to count. She kept coming up with an unsatisfactory answer as she struggled to reconcile her limited attention span and hazy mental math.

"Forget it. There were probably exactly twenty one pounds of food in the room to begin with. After all, appreciating life starts with not wasting food and sending it off to starving children in China, or something like that." Her voice was clear and confident, but a little too loud.

Terra stepped in front of the doorway and hoped she was right.

**VIII**

Starfire incinerated the trap door overhead. She burst out of the pit, eyes glowing, mandibles waving, like the angelic herald of some betentacled elder god.

The path before her was clear enough. The hallway progressed straight to a staircase with each step painted a slightly different hue of eye-watering pink. She could almost taste Robin, his sharp meaty scent cutting through the sugary aromas like a diamond drill.

Raven was floating a few feet to her left, murmuring "Azerath, Metrion, Zynthos," Her eyes were closed, and she was encased in a bubble of dark energy.

"Friend Raven, Robin's pheromones are still heavy with duress and adrenaline. Come with me quickly so that we may rescue him!"

Raven continued her litany without the slightest alteration. Starfire's attention was drawn to a notecard floating in the abjuration field, etched with Raven's characteristic gothic script.

"I am busy. Interrupt me and I will send half of you to another universe."

Starfire stared at the note. Raven was normally somewhat terse and withdrawn, but this was a extreme even for her. The normally precise script was large and a bit jagged, sharp rough marks cutting into the paper. She had written this quickly, and hadn't been able to spare a lot of brainpower.

Starfire was worried about Robin. She was angry at Raven for not helping her. She wondered if Terra was okay. She thought her friends were in various stages of immanent danger. She thought Raven was being a coward and an exoskeletonless earth-creature. She knew that Raven probably had a good reason for what she was doing, and that it was important, even if she wasn't sharing it, because that was just her way. She contemplated the different enemies that might await her at the end of this rescue mission, old and new. She held the joy of flight in one mind, the boundless confidence in another, and her righteous fury was so thick that she needed to devote three selfs just to containing it.

All these thoughts and feelings occurred simultaneously on parallel planes of awareness. Her foremost mind weighed in all these opinions and decided to go onward alone. She had to trust that her current companions knew what they were doing. She intended to rescue her imperiled Robin and/or defeat her enemy as best she could.

She ascended the staircase. At the top was a large flashing neon arrow pointing to a doorway with the words "ANTAGONIST SECRET HIDEOUT" on it.


	20. Chapter 20

**CHAPTER 20**

**I**  
Terra shifted her wait onto the threshold, and a loud buzzer sounded. She treaded air like a Tex Avery cartoon character as the floor opened beneath her, revealing acid, spikes, and scaly mutations.

She remained above the clouds of swirling knock-out-gas and the pit of pulp fiction hazards by wrapping her arms and legs around the wall-mounted TV set.

The TV Flicked on.

"I told you not to cheat. I have cameras everywhere, cleverly concealed. You have not yet escaped the fate of your sin," said the clown-masked face.

Terra looked around. Just within arm's reach, there was a large bush attached to the wall with a sign beneath it saying "THIS IS TOTALLY JUST A BUSH" and a suspiciously lens-like glint among its leaves.

Terra screwed up her eyes and stuck out her tongue. She reached over, twisted off the lense cap, then jumped into the camera and squeezed through the wire.

**II**  
Starfire stood in front of doorway, frozen with hesitation. On one mandible, there was a big sign that said this would be the secret hideout for the villain. On the other mandible, it seemed a bit too obvious for a secret hideout, and villainous characters were known for being deceitful and underhanded.

The nefarious individual behind these events might have anticipated this response, and hid in plain sight on the basis that any obvious entry would be taken for a trap. The unseen enemy had managed to use her own eyebeams against her with the crystalline entity. Still, that oddly familiar person with the puppet mask had not taken her eye-beams into account, and displayed a serious lapse of judgment.

All these conclusions were almost simultaneous. The lines of thought ran parallel and perpendicular in her inhumanly rapid nervous system. It was lucky for her that her mind was so engineered, because she stopped wondering and noticed the environmental cues faster than anyone with a human brain. She sprang out of the way just as several tons of chocolaty death fell from the ceiling.

**III**  
Terra snapped off the camera lens and squeezed her way out. She landed in a room lit only by the red "RECORDING IN PROGRESS" sign. The sickly clown-masked man in the wheelchair looked at Terra and gasped.  
"How did you do that?"

Terra shrugged. "It's not that hard. I've watched the Paprika movie a lot."

"Very well. You've escaped the first test and proved yourself worthy to live, but there is still another challenge be-OW!"

The mask went flying as Terra hit Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes with a quick left jab.

"Wha, why did you do that? You can't hurt me. You're powers aren't supposed to work here."

"Yeah, there aren't many rocks around. So what?" Terra punctuated her question with another punch to the face. "I don't need super-powers to take out a terminally ill gimp. Heck, I could probably probably take you if I was drunk, and sleep-deprived, and you had a sword."

"You can't do this!" Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes Used In Picture Puzzles whined. "I haven't killed anyone. I was never going to kill anyone. I just wanted to teach people a-AUK!" Tool coughed and spat out a tooth.

"Oh please, don't try the dodgy self-justification on me," Terra said, rolling her innocent blue eyes. "Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt. You set me and my friends, well, friend and possible enemy, although I'm trying to be nice to her but I think she's still a little bit cold towards me, understandable considering-erm, I'm getting off track. You set _us_ in booby traps that were clearly designed to kill us, and that's nothing new, but you also had to _lecture_ us! How annoying and boring is that? It wasn't very effective either. At least when Beast Boy makes a preachy speech about free will he puts some feeling into ut, and he does that cute little 'Terra-I-still-love-you' pose." Terra's eyes went all sparkly as she thought about Beast Boy's lovable earnestness and skin-tight outfit. She shook her head. "Sorry, got distracted again."

Terra grabbed Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes by the hair, wedged her foot in the spokes of his wheelchair, and yanked him out. He hit the floor face-first.

"Ahh! You can't do this! You're a super hero!" Tool for Cutting whimpered.

"You know, I used to think that once," Terra said, nonchalantly cleaning her ear with a finger and tugging the wheelchair just out of Tool's reach. "Then I thought I was a supervillain. Then I got turned to stone, got tortured in the afterlife, rose through the infernal ranks of power, came halfway back to life as a flesh-eating revenant, and then I really came back to life and had to get shrunk down from 50ft woman size. I dunno about ironic deathy-traps, but those experiences sure gave me a heavy does of introspection and personal revelation. I've come to terms with my quirky moral ambiguity."

With that last word, she ran over his fingers with his own wheelchair.

"I, I, I'm telling sixty minutes on you! You hurt a disabled man!" Tool for Cutting Irrregular Shapes Used in Picture Puzzles squealed.

"Wouldn't be the first time," she quipped. "At least you won't get roasted alive. That's what a lot of brave heroes do to targets like you."  
"You're, you're going to pay for your sins! I'm going to think up some really elaborate and improbable way to ki-, I mean, test you, and you'll be too stupid to choose life over death!"  
Terra playfully yanked the IV tube out of his arm and sucked on it. "Mmm, salinicious!"

"Any moment now, my crazy orderly henchman is going to come over and-UGH!" Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes Used in Picture Puzzles groaned as Terra kicked him in the ribs.

"Give me back my IV!" he whined.

"Ooh, you mean _this_ IV pouch?" Terra said, waving it out of his reach.

"Yes, let me have it so I can teach other people the value and beauty of life! Let me have it"

Terra landed another bone-cracking prod with her foot.

"I let you have it alright!" she snickered.

"You idiot," Tool for Cutting said, as he coughed and sputtered, "I've heard better taunt lines in a creepy European puppet show."

Terra gave a last slurp, and dropped the empty pouch on Tool for Cutting's face. She looked a little embarrassed.  
"Sorry, improvisation isn't my strong suit. How about a critical review?"

Tool for Cutting stared at her blankly.

"Alright, the first movie was okay, as far as self-righteous torture-porn goes," Terra said. "But the second movie was due for a good _ribbing_!" She swung her leg and heard a satisfying crack.

"The third one was tedious, really hard to buy, and utterly contrived. It was padded out with too much pretentiousness and weak excuses to spill some _guts_!"  
Terra dove her foot into his solar plexus.  
"And, um, well I didn't even see the fourth or fifth ones, but I can tell from the online reviews that the were some pointless, studio-sludge and major pains in the _butt_"

Tool for Cutting Irregular Shapes Used in Picture Puzzles screamed as Terra sat on him, hard. Two-hundred and seventeen pounds of blond super heroine smacked against his withered flesh and ground together the existing factures in his ribcage.

Terra wiped her forehead. "Man, now I'm really tired and hungry." She tried to find a more comfortable position and the pompous terminally-ill psychopath screamed with pain. "It's a shame I used up all the food in the other room. I could really go for a Meaty Meat burger right now. Nah, I'm too hungry for a burger. I'd really like some fried spam, or roast pork, or rare stake…"  
She wiped some drool from her mouth and looked at the helpless figure pinned underneath her.

**IV**  
Starfire panted, staring at the solid mass of chocolate that would have crushed her to a pulp if she had the slow, linear thought-process of a human.

"Wow, that's a lot of chocolate!" said a voice two inches from her ear.

Starfire leapt into the air like a startled cat. Unlike a startled cat, she stayed there.

"Friend Terra, you alarmed me!" she squealed, firing off an involuntary starbolt.

"Sorry about that," Terra said. She let off a large belch and blushed.

"Come with me, friend Terra. I can smell Robin, Beast Boy, and Cyborg ahead, and they are in some distress!"

"Mmph mpmh, sure!" Terra said, wiping chocolate from her lips and grabbing another 20 pound bar.

They both charged into the doorway, and stopped on the threshold. The two superheroines were stuck fast. Terra's bubble-butt pressed against Starfire's stretched purple skirt. The redhead alien's broad belly pressed the blond foundling against the door's frame. Chubby cheeks flushed and fat-sheathed muscles strained.

As they tried to squeeze past each other, Terra and Starfire took in the scene ahead.

They saw the full glory of Weird Wally's Candy-Shop of Mystical Wonders.

**V**

Raven reached out with her mind.

Tendrils of thought and empathy crawled through the warehouse, like roots sinking into a sidewalk crack. Here and there she nudged up against a trapped soul, and she gave a little encouraging nudge, sharing her peace with them as she drew symbiotic strength from their emotions.

When she reached her opponent, she could tell it. She hadn't even seen this creature before, or heard of it, but it was at the center of the overgrown labyrinth of arcane powers. It wasn't the warped love of mother Mae-eye. It wasn't the gaudy illusion-rich stage magic of Mumbo Jumbo. It wasn't the sorcerous bad vibes of Jinx.

It was discordant and overwhelming, like staring at the color made by a Metallica concert with your eyes crossed. She reached out with slow wriggling thoughts to investigate the source.

The psychic firewall flared up against her. A simplistic chant, loud and fast to the point of incomprehensibility, echoed through her mind in a perpetual loop. She rolled back her eyes and screamed in pain as the musical backlash shook her skull.

_What do you do with the drunken sailor what do you do with the drunken sailor what do you do with the drunken sailor early in the morning?_


	21. Chapter 21

[b][u]CHAPTER 21[/u][/b]

[b]I[/b]

Terra trembled before the chocolate waterfall.

Starfire stared at the cotton candy colossus.

Thirteen dark chocolate monsters, identical to the one that had attacked them in the department store, lurched about the sugary fantasy land. A mint dragon scoured the unreachable ceiling with its frosty breath. Gingerbread men scurried like ants to perform a thousand complex tasks in machinery that was the rape-child of Hershey Park and the war room from Dr. Strangelove. Forests of lollipops loomed, and syrup-filled wax replicas of prehistoric beasts struggled in taffy tar-pits.

"Starfire?"

"Yes, friend Terra?"

"I don't think we can take on all these guys."

"I believe your statement has merit."

Terra and Starfire extracted their zaftig forms from the doorframe and hid themselves in a cluster of snozzberry bushes.

"Do you have any propositions as to how we might penetrate this area undetected?"

Terra burped thoughtfully. "We could ambush some low-level minions, beat them up, and then steal their clothing."

Starfire pondered this. "I appreciate that contribution, but it appears that these villains do not wear any clothing."

This was followed by thoughtful silence.

Terra idly shuffled her feet against the ground, scuffing against roots and kicking up dust.

She froze. She looked down at the dust. Starfire could almost hear the wheels behind her blond hair turning.

"I've got it!" Terra declared.

[b]II[/b]

There was no telling how long they had been suspended up there. Beast Boy had given up counting after 7,777,772 bottles of beer on the wall. Robin was off in a cloud of delirium brought on by the physical strain on his only-human body, talking about the circus. Cyborg's keen mechanical eye was the first to pick up the curious thing.

Two small mounds of earth were zig-zagging across the earthen floor of the vast confectionary chamber. The bumps would pause, extend a crude periscope, and then veer off in a new direction.

"Boy Wonder, Grass Stain," Cyborg hissed. Beast Boy perked up. Robin shook his head like a dog, and a small cascade of spiders fell out of his ears.

Cyborg nudged his head in the direction of the tunnels.

The tunnel came to a halt under them, and the periscope was raised. Robin her a loud sniffing noise, and then the tunnel burst into a blinding cloud of debris.

Strong hands grasped Robin and lifted him up, and with two loud chomps his chocolate restraints were gone. Cyborg and Beast Boy were similarly liberated and lowered safely to the ground.

"Friends, I am so glad to see you safe and well!" They couldn't make out more than vague forms in the cloud of dust, but they all felt something big, warm, and squishy press against them in a massive hug.

"Come friends! We must depart from this dreadful place before Terra's concentration wanes and the concealment is lifted!"

Robin was wondering if this some deception. Cyborg wondered how Starfire could have gotten so much less boney since the last time he'd been hugged. Beast Boy was wondering which "yo mamma" joke could be most gainfully adapted for this situation.

Terra froze. Weird Wally's cookie dough construct was moving towards the dust cloud, along with a small honor guard of gingerbread men and a mass of mutant jam with a glaring eyeball in it.

Terra grunted, and surged more dust into the air. The increased cloud swallowed up the new servitors before they could raise the alarm.

The other titans saw only vague shapes in the center of the dust cloud. The shadows crowded together, slurping and chewing sounds came out, and then there was just one darker patch. The patch resolved into Terra, holding up her bulging bare belly with both hands.

"That was a piece of cake-ow!" Terra winced, then shuddered, and doubled over with pain.

"Terra, are you okay?" Beast Boy asked, leaning over her.

Starfire drifted closer. "Friend Terra, what troubles you?"

"I…I," She stammered, eyes bulging, "feel like I'm going to"

Terra thumped her stomach, made a funny expression, and opened her mouth.

The dust cloud dispersed. Rushing air knocked Beast Boy and Starfire flat on their backs. Car alarms went off.

"BURP!"

Terra relaxed. "Oh man, that's better."

Drawn by the echoing belch, every delectable dinosaur, chocolate juggernaught, and minty monster turned its attention on the titans. Gizmo, Jinx, and Mammoth lead the battalion of sweets in a charge.

Robin stared at the surrounding army.

"Titans," Robin paused to work up more moisture in his mouth and keep his voice from cracking, "go?"

[b]III[/b]

Starfire drew back her head, extended her mandibles, and screamed a supersonic howl of hunger and bloodlust. Her nine fat-padded stomachs thundered with the full force of Tamarian battle hunger. Drool gushed from her maw. It was just enough to make the advancing confectionary legion hesitate.

Terra conjured up great claws of earth that held her enemies fast to the ground. She pounced towards the first gummy-raptor with carnivorous glee. One long gulp and it vanished into her gut, swelling so it reached past her knees. The candy combatants were held fast and helpless. Terra chewed apart a taffy triceratops, sugar innards spraying everywhere, like a crab tearing into a beached whale.

Her digestion was incredible. You could watch her gut slowly shrink as it compacted each meal, and the fresh influx of sugar in her bloodstream drove her on to seek more food. A 7ft tall marzipan warrior, a white chocolate centaur, and a 50ft tall cloud of mobile cotton candy were devoured with barely a hiccup.

Terra's gut had become so densely packed it was dragging in the ground. She barely had the strength to shift her mass far enough to gulp down another gingerbread man. By the time she had snapped it up, her puny legs were too weak to support her. She heaved, pushed, strained, and belched, but she was just too full to walk.

The newly freed male titans hadn't been idle. Robin was engaged in a duel with Mammoth, countering every swing of the giant lollipop with a parry of his bow staff. He lobbed an explosive batarang into the enemy masses every time he had movement to spare.

Cyborg's sonic cannon was just the right thing to shatter the lumbering behemoths of milk chocolate, but he wasn't able to press that advantage long. Jinx plunged at him with a triple-blast of subzero neopolitan ice cream. She darted around him, taking magical pot-shots and using her superior maneuverability to stay out of close combat range.

Beast Boy was charging down some of the larger dinosaurs as a towering sauropod when a swarm of Gizmo-loompahs attached him. They bit, kicked, and jabbed, all-but-burying the thrashing green dinosaur in a tide of orange midgets.

Starfire plunged ahead eating everything in her path. She snapped up a pair of gummy-raptors and her raging alien digestive fluids melted the sugary matter. Her long sticky tongue whipped out and snagged a passing boulder of chocolate from a damaged colossus. Every second she ingested another opponent, and the raging bodily processes of full battle-hunger integrated them into her mass.

Starfire unleashed volleys of starbolts and eye beams during the brief seconds that her mouth was full, but she never stopped eating. A triceratops four times her size made of frosted sugar tried to smash her into the ground. It's foot landed straight in her eager mouth. Her lips stretched around it with inhuman flexibility, and the beast tried to pull back. It was pointless. The sugar was melting away at her saliva's touch, and with every struggle she gulped down more of it.

She barely chewed as she crammed it all in, and before it was fully swallowed she hefted a distended gut seven feet wide and chomped on the tail of a chocolate allosaurus. She pulled it down, chewing and gulping, tugging it closer with her powerful arms. She chewed up to the base of the tail, then the legs, then she was taking giant bites out of a nougat center. She crunched up the head, and swallowed the two tiny arms like an after-dinner mint.

Starfire groaned, gurgled, and belched. Her chubby arms arms and tree-trunk legs rested on her own stretched skin, far away from the ground. She was too bloated, too stuffed, too swollen with fattening food to even touch the ground, much less walk.

The legion of the delicious was still coming.

[b]IV[/b]

Terra's shirt was riding so far up and stretched so tight it was starting to fuse with her bra on a molecular level. Her tummy's skin was translucent with distention, and without the background magic relaxing the laws of reality, she probably wouldn't be alive. She was moaning and rubbing her immobile gut, unable to move, overwhelmed by one sensation.

"More!"

Whatever impulse control or restraint Terra had possessed long ago vanished. Magically-charged glucose was pulsating through her bloodstream, and she was in the grip of a clinical-grade sugar rush. Caloric energy surged through her, but the only use she could think of for it was getting just another taste of sweetness.

She could see the lumbering dinosaurs. She could see the giant statues of chocolate. They were all taunting her, mocking her inability to consume them, so close and so far.

Her eyes glowed bright yellow. Despite all the training, Terra's control over her powers was still a little shaky. Whenever she had too much energy in her system, it was the first place it would go.

The ground cracked. Terra shuddered. She needed something to focus on.

Another chocolate behemoth lurched towards her. She remembered meeting one of its kind in the shopping mall. She remembered trying so hard to eat all of it, only to be cheated that supreme meal.

The power welled up under her. Terra licked her lips.

"I might be too stuffed to walk, but that won't stop me," she snarled.

A pillar of stone lifted her up into the air. She soared until she perched above the chocolate behemoth.

"I'm ready for seconds!" she shouted. The tower of rock bent, and she slid off mouth-first, aiming for the peak of its head.

Gummy-raptors circled Starfire, trying to attack the immobilized figure without getting too close to her pudgy fingers or slathering jaws.

Somewhere, starfire was happy, overjoyed with the sweet taste and the sense of fullness in the first six stomachs. She focused on that feeling. She drew in the happiness of knowing that Beast Boy, Cyborg, and especially Robin were alive and well.

She was too bloated to walk, but the joy of flight lifted her into the air.

Starfire shot up into the rafters. She swooped back down, adding gravity to her momentum, and turned the fleeing pack of gummies into an in-flight snack. Starbolts blasted every confectionary monstrosity that would do harm to those she knew and loved.

Starfire's body was fast at work reducing the bulky sweets into layers of blubber, but it wasn't fast enough to keep up with her appetite. Her butt was big enough to take up an entire sofa, and her cleavage was deep enough to hide a pygmy goat. It was still dwarfed by her gurgling spherical gut.

She was half-way through a squad of gingerbread men when a blast of biting cold and sweet freshness knocked her into the wall. The mint dragon roared its challenge.

[b]V[/b]

Terra's open mouth lodged on the pointed crest of the behemoth's head. Sweet, sweet chocolate filled her tastebuds.

If she had taken a moment to think, reality would have caught up with her, and it would never have worked. It was good then that Terra never stopped to think when there was chocolate to be eaten.

Her mouth stretched out, wider and wider, as she slid-down the pyramid shaped crest. Her head quintupled in size, growing with cartoony exaggeration to accomidate the sheer volume. She chewed faster than the eye could see, mowing through the chocolate monster with the full force of gravity and gluttony. She crunched up the shapeless head, devoured arms, and masticated the thick stubby legs.

This time, Terra wasn't dwarfed by her belly, she was lost on it. She was a huge, flesh-colored sphere, twenty feet high with a comically tiny arms, legs, and head near the summit. Her tummy groaned and gurgled as digestive fluids raged against literally tons of milk chocolate. Terra was fuller than ever, too paralyzed by indigestion to do anything but pant and belch.

Starfire, on the other hand, was still hungry. The mint dragon was soaring towards her, transparent-green wings flapping, it's skin a swirl of white and blue. Azurite light glowed in its eyes, and it had to be twenty feet from snout to tail.

It radiated an aura of cold, stinging the ample amount of exposed skin on her swollen tummy.

Starfire unleashed a pair of starbolts against it, but they were neutralized by a puff of wintergreen frost from its nostrils. It took two great beats of its wings, and lashed out.

Starfire felt cold claws clamp over each one of her arms. The muscular scaly legs stretched out, and pain shot through her. It was trying to pull her apart. Her alien strength was bountiful, but this mythical beast was just a bit stronger. She felt her exoskeleton bend and grate against her vestigial bones.

The beast bent down its head to face hers. It showed off its glowing white teeth, and inhaled.

[b]VI[/b]

Starfire unleashed an eye-beam straight down its throat and fired starbolts straight at its wings. The creature flailed and thrashed around, retzyn brain melting under the lazer assault. Starfire extended her mandibles and parted the scaly flesh on the monster's chest. Her tongue shot out and clenched the creature's heart.

Starfire had seriously injured her quarry. That was good. She was still tight in it's grip, falling towards the ground. That was bad.

She focused on the joy of flight, straining for the ceiling, but the creature's dead weight was overcoming her. At the same time, she was filled with the strongly ingrained desire to devour its heart and gain its courage. She was squeezing her arms and legs out of the twitching claws, but she just couldn't bear to let go of that rich, tasty courage.

The dragon stopped flapping, and crashed to the ground.

Terra had digested a lot of chocolate, but she still had too much packed belly to reach the ground. Her improbable metabolism had burned up a lot of the chocolate, but the left-over calories had accumulated on her double-chin and arm-flab. She squeezed out another big, long, trucker-burp, and rolled a little.

"This is sooo *urp* awesome," she moaned. "I'm totally stuffed. I've got all the chocolate I ever wanted to eat, except, maybe," she paused for breath, "I'll feel better if I can get just *burp* one more bite."

Her eyes were unfocused and flooding with yellow light. Her tongue lolled.

[i]Urgh. I should be able to move again when I'm finished digesting, but I want more now.[/i} She tried lifting herself up on another pillar of rock. It got up a few feet, but then it crumbled under her mass. She smacked back against the ground sharply. The impact left a small crater, forced another belch out of her, and made her roll a few feet.

Terra's eyes lit up. Sugar-fueled synapses yielded a new bright idea.

She pushed up a little bit of earth behind her, slanting the ground at a slight incline. She tilted forward and began rolling.

[b]VII[/b]

Robin saw the dragon clutching Starfire begin to falter. He saw Starfire half-buried in its flesh as it plummeted towards the ground.

He feinted at Mammoth, hurled some flash-powder, and backflipped over him. He pushed off against the lollipop in mid air to gain extra momentum.

He didn't have time to think. He only saw the huge mass hit the ground with Starfire somewhere underneath.

It left a crater. His attention was fixed on the mass of pulverized meat. As he ran to it, somebody else's life flashed before his eyes.

He didn't draw back when the dragon started twitching. He didn't think about what stance a single human stood against a raging monster. He didn't even remember how the efforts of five titans were barely enough to deal with the dragon Malchior.

The dragon lurched, and it's back exploded.

Starfire poked her head out. Through the haze of battle-hunger, her compound eyes locked on him. She was covered in entrails and fatter than a retired football player but the only expression on Robin's face was sheer joy at seeing her alive.

Maybe it was brush with death. Maybe it was the near-lethal sugar high. Maybe it was just the right time.

Starfire grabbed Robin's cape and yanked him up against her. It was a full Tamaranian, lips, tongue, and mandibles scraping inside his mouth.

Starfire covered her embarrassment by digging in to the dragon-flesh with renewed enthusiasm. The boy wonder rejoined the fray, blushing slightly, and vaguely surprised by how fresh her breath had been.

Terra was eating a path of destruction through the ranks. She squashed whole herds of gummy dinosaurs. She gobbled up anything to big to squash. As she ate more, she got bigger and rounder. The bigger she became, the faster she rolled, and the more devastating inertia she had to bring down on her edible enemies. The faster she went, the more food she devoured. It was a voracious cycle, and she loved every moment of it. She wasn't going to stop until she reached the ceiling.

Mammoth was still staggering around blind. Beast Boy had snuck out of the pile of Gizmo-loompahs as a tiny snake, and they hadn't figured out they were just fighting each other. Cyborg scored a direct hit on Jinx with his sonic cannon when she leapt aside to avoid Robin's birdarang, and closed in before she could get out of melee range.

The air melted.

Time shook.

Space undulated.

Light turned inside out.

Weird Wally walked in, with the shadows of a thousand alien nightmares at his heels.

He struck the ground with his staff. Peppermint dinosaur skeletons lurched out of the taffy tar-pits. A swarm of cinnamon phoenixes materialized in the air. Buttercream zombies burst out of the ground. Enough gingerbread troops to conquer Europe lined up before him.

"Honey, I'm home!" He chirruped.


	22. Chapter 22

**CHAPTER 22**

**I**

The titans didn't despair. They didn't throw their heads up and say "Give me a break!" They just kept fighting.

The mass of the mint dragon was digested by the time Starfire broke free from its skeleton, and it proved to be more fattening. She was slightly wider than she was tall, but that didn't deter her. She ate two lime-lollipop _Allosaurs_ and a licorice _Brachiosaurus_ before she truly became too vast and bloated to even fly.

Most heroes would have given up then. Most warriors would have dropped their weapons and begged for mercy or antacids.  
This, however, was Starfire, Korandir, the princess of Tamaran.  
She looked defeated. She moaned and belched, resting on her vast belly, patting it with chubby little hands. She appeared vulnerable enough for a dozen hulking chocolate behemoths, prehistoric pastries, and mythological munchies to crowd around her and move in for the kill.  
What they didn't know was that Starfire had a very long tongue.  
It was a fascinating cite. It whipped out and wrapped around the first chocolate colossus, and the two masses, orange and brown, moved together slowly. The insatiable Tamaranian sunk in her teeth and mandibles, stretched her lips, and then there was a much bigger orange mass, and the tongue had wrapped around a hard candy stegosaurus. Each new meal gave her enough energy for another tongue-grab and prolonged, dragging, swallow. Soon the engulfing process was not a mutual drag of opposed bulks, but a creature capable of destroying a city being sucked up like a sushi roll.

When they were all gone into the titanic orange tummy, the rest of the army gave it a very wide berth.

Terra had run into a spot of trouble herself. Chasing after a pack of lemon-meringue _Giganotsaurus _, she had rolled into a small valley. She couldn't get up the sides, and her momentum carried her downhill where a waterfall emptied into a vast chocolate lake.  
She splashed in and went under a few times, but she came to rest up against the cliff and the waterfall. This was a problem for the other titans, because the sloping sides meant she couldn't roll her way out.  
This was not a problem for Terra. She looked upward, opened her mouth, and let the chocolate pour in.

Cyborg was holding his own against Jinx, despite the gingerbread warriors that had come to reinforce her. His sonic blast had at least fractured her ribs, and without boundless agility the sorceress made an almost pitiful opponent. Beast Boy was confronted with a restored army of Gizmo-loompahs and white chocolate centaurs. His answer to this was to turn into a bat, fly high above them, and then turn into a sperm whale in mid-air. Robin just lobbed another flash-grenade at Mammoth.  
As one man, they turned and attacked Weird Wally.  
Beast Boy gave him a full elephant charge. Cyborg leveled a sonic cannon at him with a boot blast to back it up. Robin tossed three batarangs, a cry-pack, and an explosive cartridge.

It would have been enough to kill a human.  
It was certainly enough to seriously injure most robots, aliens, and mutants.

Voices came out of the smoke. It was a thousand dying rasps coming together to make a deafening sound. As the wave of sweet smelling-air knocked them flat on their backs, it called out to them.  
_"Nanny nanny boo boo, you can't ."_

This wasn't strictly true. Wally hadn't come out of the assault in one piece. His right leg was hopping along beside him, followed by a hand, a few loops of intestine, and an eyeball.

Robin gulped. He had faced villains that could reform from a thin slime. He had fought monsters that just grew new bodies when they were cut in half. This was different.

In the socket where his eye had been knocked out, a thin-lipped mouth cackled. Crab legs stretched out through the rent where a leg had been gored off. The strips of ruined flesh around his torso were weaving themselves into clutching fingers.  
The intestinal loops sprouted a series of tiny wings, and a lidless eye poked out at each end. They circled the air around him. The hand had shucked its skin to reveal pale purple chitin, with a claw on each finger, a bloodshot eye on the palm, and a toothy rasping mouth for a thumb. The leg had sprouted little tentacles all along its side.

"You can't beat _me_, because there is no _me_. There's **us**. Psychic symbiotes, alien parasites, brain-control fungus, elemental orbs, ghosts, demonic, diabolic, daemonic, and kako-demonic entities, every little thing that crawls, that invades, that shares a body with another is shacked up here, and _we_ are more than the sum of our parts! You can tear us, you can cause us pain, but you cannot kill us or keep us down because there is something in here that will be immune, and that something will jump-start the others! Exorcise us, and the Hrang spine-worms will summon the others back in. Try to flush out the parasites, and the demons will reanimate them. A psychic purge will leave the limbs in full control of the nerve rot, and you will be throttled before you can finish the job. We are great, we are many, and we can't believe you fell for the old 'provide exposition to distract the self-styled heroes while minions sneak up on them' trick!"

Mammoth twisted Robin's head as he kicked and flailed. He was just discovering that, unlike in the movies, it is really hard to snap somebody's neck with your bare hands. Gizmo-Loompahs had Cyborg pinned to the ground, carefully pointing his sonic cannon and his boot blaster away from them. Beast Boy was frozen solid inside a delicious strawberry glaze, courtesy of Jinx.

"We are victorious," Weird Wally said.

A great darkness welled up. Tentacles of midnight snacked out and pulled dinosaurs and chocolate behemoths out of sight. Four red eyes glared in the umbral cloud, and it gave off a series of roars, snarls, sounds of frenzied eating, and one deep belch.

"No, we are," said Raven.

**II**

At the other end of the candy cavern, Terra was still drinking in the chocolate. She'd swollen enough to rise up higher than the source of the waterfall, but she managed to roll forward a little so her lips were still pressed down against it. The pace of the current wasn't enough, so she started actively sucking at it, slurping it in like a milkshake. Because of all this frantic drinking, she's swallowed a lot of air.  
She only noticed that now because the waterfall had run dry. Now that she wasn't actively engaged in chocolate consumption, she could feel the mountain-sized stomachache and gas pains.

Terra groaned. She whimpered. She squealed as pain turned to agony. She wished Beast Boy where here to give her some alka-seltzer, and a tummy rub, and maybe some more chocolate.

Then she felt it, rising up in her, like the midgard serpent bursting out of the sea.

**III**  
Every segment of Weird Wally glared at Raven. While it wasn't quite up to Terra or Starfire's size, she was resting on a belly that kept her feet from touching the ground. "What are you going to do? You think that Mr. T's moody brat scares me?"

She didn't say anything. She was gritting her fangs. All four eyes were screwed shut in concentration.

Everything glowed black. The black was split into a prism of anti-light.  
It was easy enough, once she knew what to do. Weird Wally's creations were driven by soul magic

Weird Wally's Candy Shop of Mystical Wonders shuddered.

She just reached out to the minds, restless, shocked, angry souls, and let those emotions lash out against the person using them.

The whole building shook. The dinosaurs and behemoths and phoenixes stopped in their tracks. Some of them lay down, inert. Some dissolved into refined sugar. Some exploded like chocolate, frosted, sugar bombs.

All seven of weird Wally's eyes twitched. He sniffed dismissively.  
"So what? I can still conjure up another army, and that psychic web won't last long after I kill you."

Raven smiled as her psychic message flickered outwards. _Titans, go_

Starfire was too big to move, but she didn't have to be mobile to fight. A barrage of star-bolts and eye-beams shot towards Wally at the speed of special effects.

Cyborg fired a foot blast, his sonic canon, and launched a series of detachable robot tools and weapons that up until now had only been used once, in a very specific situation where the plot demanded it. Robin unleashed his entire stock of cryoblasts, birdarangs, explosive charges, and flash powder, and swung his bo staff for a blow to the jaw just to be sure. Beast Boy spat cobra venom, vomited sea-cucumber inards, slathered lethal Komodo Dragon saliva, and let loose a blast of scalding Bombardier Beetle flatulence in Weird Wally's general direction.

Removing Wally's soul power had several effects. It lessened his supernatural reserves. It destroyed his creations. It also broke any behavior-controlling spells he had worked.

The Hive Five charged after the man who had played dress-up with them, controlled their minds, and pressed boiling donut glaze on their bare eyeballs.

Mammoth swung the lollipop against every piece of him until the candy broke. Gizmo let loose a dozen different nasty devices of high-tech revenge. Jinx unleashed her full magical might against him.

The smaller chunks vaporized. Ethereal shapes writhed and struggled in the churning melee.

Raven encased them all in an orb of darkness, and cast forth every purging evocation, exorcism, banishment, and cleansing smell she knew.

The mass of spirit and flesh that had been Weird Wally thrashed and mewled, spitting green fire until Raven's barrier dropped.

"Very well. You have proven yourselves worthy adversaries. Some of you will make excellent candidates for our advanced state of being. Until then, know that we shall one day-"

"BUUUURP!"

The sound echoed through every corner of the candy warehouse. Its shockwave disrupted the wally-thing's escape portal, and the quivering brain-parasites and willow-the-wisps furiously reworked it.

They didn't pay attention the rushing wind and the rumbling sound.

"We WILL come again, mark our-"

Splat.

The gigantic bulk of Terra rolled past the purple smear on the ground and bumped gently against a wall. "Hey guys, what's up?"

"Nice one!" Beast Boy said, and then he fell over laughing.


	23. Chapter 23

**Epilogue**

**I**  
The nude woman wrapped her slender arms around the gasping medical technician. He moaned and shuddered as sweat streamed down his face.

The woman locked her lustful eyes on him. She pulled closer and locked lips.

There was an electric surge. Blue light siphoned out of his body, and the man screamed. The woman grinned wider, biting down on his lip even as it blistered and shrunk. Within moments he fell from her hands in a desiccated heap.

"NTS: insert quip from Beast Boy here" Beast Boy quipped.

Terra laughed so hard that strawberry milkshake came out of her nose.

"You're gremplork hilarious Beast Boy," Terra said.

"Really?" Beast Boy asked, blushing and preening as the space vampire on the TV screen continued her naked rampage.

"Uh-huh," Terra said, looking back and forth between Beast Boy and the nude French model actress. "You're so witty, and cool, and you know so much about scifi and pop-culture."

Her stomach gurgled.  
"Soo, being the capable cute guy you are, could you get me another milkshake?"

Her stomach roared again.  
"And some fried pork rinds? And another mocha swirl cheesecake?"

Beast Boy was still swooning with the emotional high of praise and attention. "Sure! No problem!"

Beast boy dashed off. Terra rubbed her huge belly. It overhung the couch, and her hand sunk into the layer of blubber. Her XXXXL T-shirt covered less than a quarter of her tummy, and was stretched taught by her ham-shaped arms and modest chest.

Beast Boy transformed into a giant octopus and loaded up on platters of food for Terra. He spared a glance for the scrabble game going on at the kitchen table.

**II**  
"Are you sure that's a word?" Robin asked Starfire.

"I am quite sure. It refers to individuals with a great fear of foreigners and/or extraterrestrials," she said, placing the last tile of "xenophobe" on the triple word score.

Robin took advantage of the 'B' to lay down "Aerobics"

Starfire reviewed her tiles while she chewed down another constitutional monarch-sized candy bar.

"You're really enjoying those Scrumdiddlyumptious Bars," Robin said casually.

"Indeed, I find the bars of the chocolate *burp* most nourishing," Starfire said pleasantly. She gave her three-foot-long belly an approving thump and shifted her doublewide behind against the straining chair.

Starfire spelled out "Zaftig", with the Z on a double-letter score.

Robin adjusted his mask before setting down "thyroid" on a double-word score. "So, you're feeling alright then?"

"I feel quite well today, thank you," she trilled. She shifted her shirtlette over a relatively diminutive chest region.(57)

Robin eyed the "paunch" that Starfire had set down on the board. She had to sit back further from the table these days.(58)

"Would you like to do some training after this?" He asked, contributing "unfit" to the playing table.

Starfire mulled the idea over, and she gave a slight blush visible only in the infared spectrum. "I would enjoy spending further time with you, although I feel more than adequately prepared for physical combat. Would you like to engage in the consumption of malted beverages, sliced fried roots, and the watching of large men pinning each other to the ground?"

"Maybe," Robin said. He spelled out "unique" as he tried to figure out whether she was talking about football, wrestling, or C-Span. "Getting more exercise couldn't hurt."

Starfire frowned as she guzzled down a slab of mustard-covered chocolate. "I would disagree. I have found that most intense exercise involves mild pain."

Robin flushed faintly. "Well, I mean, you could stand to lose a little weight. It would be good for your health." He put down "awkward" with a "W" on the triple-letter score.

Starfire cocked her head and her face went blank. "I am not sure I understand. I am feeling very healthy. My transitive fluid is clear and fast-flowing, my neural tissue is keen and electrolyte-rich, and I am digesting and growing faster than ever. I am of course very pleased that you are concerned for my well-being." She smiled encouragingly. She used the "I" from "thyroid" and "B" from "Xenophobe" to spell "oblivious".

Robin mulled over his letters in a long silence. He put down "quandary" right across a triple-letter score box and drew five new tiles before speaking again.  
"Well, it can't be good for you, being that big. You might feel alright now, but further along the road you'll have health problems."

The light of comprehension dawned in her multifaceted pupils.

"You are speaking of the morbid obesity! I am sorry, but I do not sI assure you that my species can expand until we are too massive to walk with no decrease in our medical integrity. ." She giggled, and gave him a comforting hug with her flabby arms.

Robin smiled, but a hint of unease in his stance remained.  
(57)The first thing she did when she got back to the Titan Tower was make some new outfits to accomidate her girth. Robin could have sworn that this XXXXXXL set was already straining to contain the extra width. In the back of his mind, he thought it a bit odd that her bust had only swollen one and a half cup sizes while her total body mass quintupled.  
(58)The last three times the game had ended when Starfire became too excited and one of her jiggling rolls scattered the tiles.

**III**  
"Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs?"  
Raven raised an eyebrow.  
"That's what it says on the grocery list. Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, seven economy size boxes," Cyborg said, zooming in his telephoto eye on the jagged handwriting.  
"That exists?" Raven asked. She winched up her eyebrow another millimeter to broadcast her shock and disbelief.  
"I'm afraid so," Cyborg confirmed. He was staring hopelessly at the massive cereal display in dried blood brown and retina-ripping green. Bright blue print on the side of the boxes proclaimed their nutritional benfits  
"Made from ingredients!"  
"Not proven to be instantly lethal!"  
"A Good Source of Calcium (With milk and calcium supplements added)"  
"Part of a Balanced Breakfast!"

Cyborg flung the boxes into the grocery cart with a little shudder. He brought up the list again.  
"Dozen eggs, a rutabaga, and oh not again! What do you need chocolate Bundt cake for when you've already got that much sugar for breakfast."

Raven didn't turn towards him as she levitated the root vegetable out of the produce aisle. The two feet of horizontal mass hanging off her sides and her three-seater behind might be able to squeeze through the narrow stalls of heirloom tomatoes and granny smith apples without incident, but she didn't want to risk it. Anyway, it was so much easier to use her powers than her muscles.  
Cyborg heard the six inflectionless words over the hum of fluorescent lights. "I thought you liked Bundt cake."

"I liked it a week ago," Cyborg said to the carton of Extra Large Free Range Eggs. "Between animated candy, mother Mae-Eye, and that Willy Wonka meets Freddy Krueger, I think I'm going to need years of therapy before I can look at anything sweet again."

Cyborg added a cauliflower to the cart. It reminded him of what happened to Mad Mod and Dr. Chang. He focused on something else.  
"There's something that's still bugging me. We were only separated for a couple of days, right?"

"So how did we blimp up so fast?" Raven asked.

Cyborg turned around. "Hold on a second, that's not what I was going to say!"  
There was a faint twitch on her chubby cheeks that could have been mistaken for a smile.

"There was a large amount of glyco-thaumic fluctuation released by Weird Wally's magic. That made 'reality' act more like a Warner Brother's cartoon, especially where food was concerned."

Cyborg nodded. "And Weird Wally is definitely dead?"

"You weren't sure of that while you were going over the remains with a welding torch, Robin was whacking them with a bo staff, and Beast Boy was lifting his leg at them?"

Cyborg studiously inspected a row of Yukon gold potatoes. "I don't really know what it takes to keep something like _that_ down and out."

"I got a clean reading afterwards," Raven said, as she magically summoned some vegetarian pepperoni that was easily within her arm's reach(59).

"Well, I'm glad to hear about that. I have to trust you when it comes to hocus pocus and horrors from outside the universe. I just kept thinking we missed something."

"Don't worry, it'll come back to you," Raven said, as she picked out several packs of Red Baron frozen pizza and a stack of mocha swirl cheesecakes.

Cyborg cocked his head. "Those aren't on the list."

Raven looked away. "Well, after that marinara sauce incident with Terra the delivery boy is still in the intensive care unit, and the others are refusing to come to the island for anything less than a 250% tip. I figured I'd give everyone a break and cook for tonight."

She caught the wince on Cyborg's remaining patches of skin.

"Don't worry, it won't be like the charred pancakes. Microwavable pizza is one thing I can cook well. And don't bother saying you didn't say that my pancakes were bad. You were thinking it."

"Actually, I was thinking that you usually head to your room for dessert," Cyborg replied smoothly.

Raven locked eyes with the russet potatoes. "Well, maybe I want a little company."

Inside Raven's soul, the little girl said, "maybe I can share the thrill of a real good sugar rush."

(59)She didn't add that she personally doused the stuff with holy water, purifying sake, consecrated wine, and CLR, before performing her two strongest exorcisms on the discolored stain that had once been Weird Wally(60)  
(60)To be safe she also dropped a piano on it.

**IV**  
"Hey Mammoth," Jinx called, "have you seen Gizmo?"

She was just poking out of her room with a towel draped over her shoulders.

"He said he was going to pick up some jolt espresso a few hours ago. Why?"

"Well, I think one of his inventions is nesting in my laundry hamper," she said. She pulled her head back inside the door and shut it.

Mammoth turned back to the "Is Brother Blood Dead?" article in The National Review. Jinx had been acting awfully withdrawn and furtive ever since they escaped Weird Wally's hideout. None of them were too keen to talk about it, and relive the experience of having their naked eyeballs scalded, then being enslaved while painfully aware of their surroundings. The natural supervillain coping mechanism for trauma was plotting elaborate revenge, and with the enemy in question unquestionably exterminated, this catharsis was denied them.

Still, this furtive reclusiveness was out of character for her. She had always been the most gregarious of their inaccurately named band of thieves. He thought about going over to her room, knocking on her door, and maybe having a little heart to heart.

Jinx popped her head out again. "You're sure you don't know where Gizmo is now?" Her face was tight with anxiety.

"Yeah, I he hasn't come back yet," Mammoth said.

Jinx slammed her door shut, and her the series of clicks and whirs that signaled the sealing of her twelve locks and one magical deadbolt. His resolve wilted, and he returned to his magazine of evil.

Jinx breathed a sigh of relief and slumped down against her bed. She rested one hand on a plush-toy narwhale named Mister Poky she had one at a carnival. She stared at the rats running around in her cage. (Jinx had once eaten a live rat for a bet, only to discover that she really enjoyed them). She looked down at her bulging stomach, and listened to the muffled litany of outrage coming from it. She burped daintily, and reached into her pocket.

"I never thought my life could be anything but catastrophe, but suddenly I begin to see a bit of good luck for me…"  
She sang in twelve different voices, all slightly out of pitch. In her hand, she grasped a glowing, shimmering ticket made of solid gold.

**THE END?**


End file.
